"NASA’s oldest active astronaut is now the oldest Eagle Scout astronaut to go on a NASA mission into space.
Don Pettit, a 69-year-old Eagle Scout from Silverton, Oregon, is serving as a flight engineer and member of Expedition 72 on the International Space Station. It is Pettit’s fourth journey into space and will add to the 370 days he had already accumulated in orbit.
“I would go back to space in a nanosecond,” Pettit said when asked about his plans for future space travel during a recent livestream Q&A on Space.com. “It’s what I do for a living. Give me another couple of days (when I get back from this mission) to get my feet on the ground, and I’m ready to go again.”
Expedition 72 is Pettit’s first trip to space in 12 years. His previous missions occurred in 2012, 2008 and 2003.
You can watch last week’s launch in the video below. Scroll to the 10:15 mark to see an interview with Pettit. The actual launch occurs around the 1-hour, 9-minute mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c59N7aHLZx8&t=1s
A photographer …
On top of being an astronaut, Pettit is an all-around interesting guy.
During his 2003 mission, he gathered spare parts from around the space station and built his own barn-door tracker, a camera mount commonly used by astronomers and photographers to capture images of stars and planets in the night sky.
Only this time, Pettit turned his camera toward Earth. The device allowed him to take some remarkable high-resolution images of nighttime city lights from the ISS.
He used those photos to create the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78BecvPoo3Q
… and an inventor
During his 2008 mission, Pettit invented a new kind of zero-gravity coffee cup. Tired of having to drink his morning coffee from a pouch through a straw, Pettit found inspiration in a random piece of plastic ripped from a flight mission book.
By folding the piece of plastic in just the right shape, he found that surface tension inside the “cup” could serve a similar role to gravity, holding the coffee in place so he could sip it as he would on the ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk7LcugO3zg
Pettit also achieved fame in the, shall we say, “nerdier” circles of the internet when he was forced to repair his complicated wristwatch in zero gravity, inadvertently changing the way NASA would handle future repairs on the space station."
