David Randolph Scott (1932-), American astronaut, born in San Antonio, Texas.

Scott attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating fifth in his class in 1954. He then served as a United States Air Force fighter pilot in Europe, and later earned two graduate degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his thesis was on space navigation. He was later a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in Lancaster, California. Scott was selected to be an astronaut by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1963.

Scott flew on three space missions. The first time was in the Gemini 8 flight, March 16, 1966. As pilot, he and Commander Neil Armstrong linked to an unmanned Agena rocket, accomplishing the first docking in space. The mission nearly became the first American disaster in space when a rocket thruster misfired, sending the linked craft spinning one revolution per second. However, the astronauts used reentry fuel to stabilize the capsule and the mission was ended after only 11 hours (see Gemini program).

Three years later, Scott flew on the Apollo 9 mission with Major James McDivitt and civilian Russell Schweickart. Orbiting Earth, the crew tested docking and rendezvous functions of the lunar module; Scott piloted the command module. On the Apollo 15 mission, in 1971, Scott took the lunar module, Falcon, to the surface of the moon. There, he and astronaut James Irwin used the first lunar rover to explore the Hadley Rille area of the Apenine mountains while Major Alfred Worden remained in lunar orbit in the command module, Endeavour (see Apollo program).

Following the Apollo program, Scott was Special Assistant for Mission Operations and trained the crew for the Apollo/Soyuz joint Russian American flight. In 1973 he became deputy director of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base and then director in 1975. Scott retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1975. In 1977 he left NASA and founded Scott Science and Technology, which provides specialized management and technical services to space projects.