Scott Parazynski
Senior teams rehearse for the predictable failure and freeze in front of the one no playbook covers. The gap between a confident strategy on paper and the team’s first moves when a live system fails is where reputations and balance sheets are made. Composure under that pressure is a trainable capability, not a temperament.
Scott Parazynski is a former NASA astronaut, physician and entrepreneur who helps leadership teams build the preparation, judgement and composure required when systems fail and the cost of hesitation is high.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Scott Parazynski
- He is the only person on record to have both flown in space and summited Everest, giving every preparation and recovery argument the weight of a verifiable case study rather than an analogy.
- His STS-120 solar array repair, 90 feet from the airlock on a live, energised structure, is a documented worked example of decision-making at the edge of available data. Few speakers can hand a board that kind of primary material.
- A Stanford-trained physician and Harvard-trained emergency clinician, he brings a clinician’s discipline to how teams triage information when something is genuinely going wrong.
- As founder of Fluidity Technologies and CEO of OnwardAir, he speaks about innovation and risk from inside two operating aerospace companies, not from a podium career.
- His material on calculated risk versus reckless risk is built from cases where the distinction was tested in real time, which lands with audiences who have heard the metaphor too many times.
Biography highlights
- Five Space Shuttle missions and seven spacewalks across 17 years at NASA, including service as EVA Branch Chief.
- Performed the STS-120 repair of a live P6 solar array tethered on the OBSS boom approximately 90 feet from the airlock.
- First person to fly in space and summit Mount Everest, reaching the summit on 20 May 2009.
- Stanford University BS Biology; Stanford Medical School MD; Harvard emergency medicine training.
- Author of The Sky Below: A True Story of Summits, Space and Speed, co-written with Susy Flory (Little A, 2017).
- Inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame, 2016; recipient of five NASA Spaceflight Medals and two NASA Distinguished Service Medals.
- Founder and CEO of Fluidity Technologies; currently leading OnwardAir, a hybrid-electric VTOL venture.
Biography
The fourth spacewalk of STS-120 in 2007 was not in any flight plan. A torn solar array on the International Space Station had to be repaired while still energised, and the astronaut sent to do it was tethered to a boom 90 feet from the airlock, further from safety than anyone had been before. The repair held. It is one of the most cited operational saves of the Shuttle era and the working example behind most of what Scott Parazynski now teaches leadership teams about decisions made on incomplete information.
He spent 17 years at NASA, flying five Shuttle missions and conducting seven spacewalks for a total of around 47 hours outside the vehicle. He served as EVA Branch Chief, leading the office responsible for how astronauts work in vacuum. The clinical training behind that career, Stanford Medical School and Harvard emergency medicine, shapes how he describes preparation: as a structured rehearsal of failure, not as confidence-building.
On 20 May 2009 he became the first person to have both flown in space and stood on the summit of Everest, after a ruptured lumbar disc forced him to abandon an earlier attempt and rebuild. The Sky Below, published with Susy Flory in 2017, is the long-form account. The book is useful here because it documents recovery and re-attempt, not just achievement.
His current work is operational. He founded Fluidity Technologies, the single-handed 3D input controller spun out of his spacewalk experience, and now leads OnwardAir, a hybrid-electric VTOL venture. That gives boards a speaker who is currently running engineering teams under capital and regulatory pressure, not narrating a former career.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership and decision-making under extreme adversity
- Calculated risk versus reckless risk
- Team performance in high-consequence environments
- Preparation, rehearsal and failure recovery
- Innovation inside engineering-led organisations
- Human performance at the edge of physiology
- Building a culture where innovation is permitted and expected
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams designing crisis-response and operational resilience capability
- CEOs and COOs in safety-critical sectors: aerospace, energy, healthcare, infrastructure
- Engineering and R&D leadership teams setting risk thresholds for novel programmes
- Leadership-development cohorts for newly senior operators
Audience outcomes
- A clearer language for distinguishing calculated risk from reckless risk inside their own decisions
- A working model of pre-mission rehearsal that they can adapt to their organisation’s failure modes
- A primary-source view of how a small team executes a non-rehearsed repair on a live system
- A more honest account of recovery from setback at the individual and team level
- A higher bar for what counts as preparation rather than reassurance
Talks
A leadership talk built from spacewalk emergencies, Everest, and boardroom experience, on how the situation should shape the leader rather than the other way around.
Key takeaways:
- How preparation changes the range of options available when a system fails
- What separates calculated risk from reckless risk in practice
- How team culture decides what gets reported up before it becomes a crisis
A talk on the operational discipline behind spaceflight and high-altitude mountaineering, and what it teaches about preparation, teamwork and risk management.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between rehearsing success and rehearsing failure
- How trust between team members is engineered, not assumed
- Where most operational failures actually originate
A working framework drawn from aerospace, medicine and mountaineering for separating considered exposure from gambling with outcomes.
Key takeaways:
- The decision points where risk gets correctly priced or quietly mispriced
- How senior leaders model risk behaviour for the team below them
- When to stop, turn around, and what that costs
A talk on building organisational cultures where innovation is both permitted and expected, drawn from inside two operating aerospace ventures.
Key takeaways:
- What an engineering culture looks like when it actually rewards the right behaviour
- How to give teams permission to try without losing safety discipline
- Where the obligation to innovate sits inside a senior leader’s role