INSPIRATION / NICOLE STOTT
A paintbrush
in orbit.
She brought home a view of Earth.
Then she made room for other people inside the picture.
By Rob Urban
The detail I keep coming back to is the paintbrush.
Nicole Stott took a small watercolor kit to the International Space Station. In October 2009, she painted The Wave, using a photograph she had taken of Venezuela’s Los Roques islands as her starting point. Her brush had belonged to her friend, artist Ron Woods. The result was the first watercolor painted in space, a small work with an unusually large studio window. Stott tells the story in her artist’s gallery.
There is something wonderfully human about that choice. Put a technically accomplished person aboard one of the most complicated things humanity has built, give her a view almost nobody gets, and she still wants to make something with her hands. A camera can record the coast. Painting asks her to spend time with what she has seen.
Stott grew up in Clearwater, studied aeronautical engineering at Embry-Riddle and later earned an engineering-management master’s degree at UCF. Florida is threaded through her story, from those classrooms to Kennedy Space Center and an underwater habitat off the Keys. Her work since NASA has brought those experiences together through art, environmental advocacy and projects that invite children into the picture.
BEFORE THE WINDOW
Years of work
before the view.
The short version of an astronaut’s biography often jumps directly from childhood ambition to launch. Stott’s NASA biography contains a much more interesting middle.
She worked on advanced engine designs at Pratt & Whitney, joined Kennedy Space Center in 1988 and took on shuttle-processing responsibilities. She also worked on the station’s truss hardware and helped train shuttle pilots as a flight-simulation engineer. NASA selected her for the astronaut corps in 2000. Her first spaceflight followed in 2009; she returned on Discovery’s final mission in 2011.
Those years matter. The person looking down at Earth had already spent a substantial part of her career helping complicated machinery do precisely what people needed it to do. In that context, her later emphasis on looking after our shared home has a practical foundation. A habitable environment is something people maintain together.
Even in orbit,
someone receives the shipment.
Her own account of her astronaut work includes operating the station’s robotic arm during the first capture of Japan’s free-flying HTV cargo vehicle, research, maintenance and a spacewalk. The cargo operation particularly interests me. The beautiful photograph of a station in orbit leaves out its dependence on deliveries, replacement equipment and coordinated work. Even up there, someone has to receive the shipment. Admittedly, the loading dock is exceptional.
It also helps explain why her public message repeatedly returns to a crew. That word has responsibilities built into it. Different people bring different abilities; their work has to fit together. Stott’s credibility on cooperation comes partly from having worked inside situations where that fit was essential.
THE OTHER FLORIDA FRONTIER
Sixty feet down.
Before she lived in orbit, Stott spent eighteen days with a team in the Aquarius undersea habitat during the 2006 NEEMO 9 mission. Her aquanaut account describes a six-person crew and the value of learning outside a conventional classroom. She subsequently supported Embry-Riddle participation in NEEMO work.
An underwater habitat is an especially useful part of her Florida story. We tend to talk about this state’s connection to exploration while looking up from the Space Coast. Her preparation also required looking beneath the water. Both settings put a small group of people inside a larger environment they could appreciate without being able to survive in it unaided.
The neighbors
had names.
The experience entered her art, too. In the gallery’s underwater collection, Aquarius’ Garden draws on the marine life around the habitat. Another work, Stella & Lucy, recalls two visiting goliath grouper she named after her dogs. That is a lovely scale change: research mission, ocean ecosystem, familiar animals, affectionate names. An extraordinary environment becomes somewhere a person has actually lived.
I like that her pictures preserve this intimacy. A scientific setting need not make the person inside it less observant, less playful or less attached to ordinary things. Sometimes it supplies entirely new material for those qualities.
A child gets to
bring something, too.
What I most admire is how she has helped other people participate in the story.
She is a founding director of the Space for Art Foundation, which works with children in hospitals, refugee centers, orphanages and schools. Its projects bring together artists, astronauts, engineers and health professionals. The foundation describes its purpose through space, art and healing; the concrete activity is making art with children and combining their contributions into larger works.
The Spacesuit Art Project’s history deserves careful credit. Artist Ian Cion brought the idea from his work at MD Anderson’s children’s cancer hospital to NASA’s Gordon Andrews in 2015. An introduction to ILC Dover’s David Graziosi helped turn it into an actual art spacesuit. Stott’s foundation biography records that she joined the project that year. This was a collaboration from the beginning.
A child’s painting changes the relationship. An astronaut can arrive as the person with the remarkable story and leave with something the child has made. There is recognition in that exchange. The child has an imagination worth encountering, and something worth contributing to a project larger than the room.
Their pictures
become part
of the suit.
The foundation reports that four of its art suits have traveled to the space station. Its later BEYOND suit assembled children’s work collected during the pandemic and debuted at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. INFINITY, completed in late 2024, used black fabric napkins originally made for an Apollo 11 anniversary celebration as the children’s canvas.
That last material choice is excellent. An object from a commemoration of an earlier generation’s achievement becomes the surface for a child’s imagination. The child does more than look at a photograph of somebody else doing something impressive. Their own mark becomes part of the object people gather to see.
The planet is
already under your feet.
Stott’s book, Back to Earth, carries her space experience into questions about the planet and our responsibility toward it. Her paintings, speaking and foundation work are different ways of approaching the same practical difficulty: how do you share a perspective that depended on going somewhere your audience is unlikely to go?
A painting can offer a point of entry. A child’s contribution can make the subject personal. A book gives an idea more room than a photograph caption. Each gives a reader or viewer time to consider part of the experience and find a connection of their own.
In an April 2026 interview, Stott was still talking about beginning with the simple awareness that we live on a planet, and about helping people engage through creativity. I appreciate the modest starting point. Nobody needs an astronaut application in progress to pay closer attention to the place they inhabit.
Her path also belongs beside Mae Jemison’s combination of scientific and creative interests in this series. Both make it harder to accept the idea that becoming technically capable requires giving up an imaginative life. Stott’s particular contribution is visible in the objects: a watercolor, an underwater scene, a suit carrying children’s pictures.
The spacecraft brought her home. She has kept finding ways to bring the view with her, and to make room in that view for people who were never aboard.
About Nicole Stott
What did Nicole Stott paint in space?
In October 2009, Nicole Stott painted The Wave aboard the International Space Station, using a photograph she had taken of Venezuela’s Los Roques islands. It was the first watercolor painted in space.
What was Nicole Stott’s underwater mission?
Stott spent eighteen days with the six-person NEEMO 9 crew in the Aquarius undersea habitat off the Florida Keys in 2006.
What is Nicole Stott’s role in Space for Art?
Stott is a founding director of the Space for Art Foundation. She joined the collaborative Spacesuit Art Project in 2015, helping connect space exploration with children’s artwork.
Sources: NASA’s career biography; Nicole Stott’s accounts of her spaceflight, undersea work and paintings; Space for Art’s project history and director biography; and Heather Muir Maffei’s April 2026 interview for Real Simple. Reflections on attention, cooperation and participation are Rob Urban’s.
For more of my writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.