How come they can get a man to the moon but they can’t program their VCRs? Do rocket scientists really have . . . : The Bright Stuff?

To hear some people tell it, a rocket scientist has reached the acme of intelligence, insight and understanding.

The actor-spokesman on TV pitches the simplicity of a new telephone rate: “We’re not talking about rocket science here.” The implied message? Even you can understand it, dummy!

Another commercial says, condescendingly: “You can connect our new TV to your VCR to your stereo to your pager to your dog’s electronic flea collar . . . without being a rocket scientist.”

And a baseball manager says of a strong but dull former player: “Let’s face it, the guy is not exactly a rocket scientist.”

Recent comments in The Times have endowed these superhumans with the patience of Job, the insight of Einstein and the common sense of Ann Landers. A brief survey found respondents saying a rocket scientist would easily understand network programming, crowd control at rock concerts, how to write music, astronomy, food research, almost anything about the economy, yachting or world politics. And realize that too much force was used against Rodney King.

They are also seen as smarter than a union leader, any tennis pro and tape-burning Sen. Charles Robb, who admitted that himself.

So, who are these folks? Are they the only ones whose VCR clocks don’t flash “12:00” at them for weeks? Is rocket science the complicated, all-but-impossible-to-master discipline that the average Jane and Joe think?

Lawrence J. Ross is director of the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, which is designing a power system for the national space station, engines for the National Aerospace Plane (essentially a reusable rocket) and power systems for “the distant trip to Mars.” He thinks the phrase rocket science comes from the late 1950s, when the United States was just entering the “space race” with the Soviet Union.

“Very few people were working in the field . . .” he says, “so it was assumed that those who were involved with rockets had far greater intellectual capacity.”

But he doesn’t necessarily agree. All kinds of people work on “launch vehicles” today. More than half of the 3,000 people who work for Ross at Lewis have advanced degrees and are chemists, chemical specialists, materials specialists, nuclear physicists and theoretical physicists.

“It’s a mixture of theoretical scientists and engineers, who tend to have dirtier hands,” Ross says. The engineers “try to make things happen.”

Rather than boasting of some awe-inspiring insight that others lack, Ross attributes the “rocket scientist” image to the way his employees think: “They think in a very logical, plodding, steppingstone sort of fashion.”

Engineers and scientists like to compartmentalize information and reassemble it “in a Tinkertoy fashion.” Ross says it stems from the interest in, and aptitude for, mathematics that scientists must have. They try to organize the information “by the model,” or according to norms that govern engineering principles.

This methodical approach to life, however, can have drawbacks. Ross once walked into a car dealership in Cleveland and pulled out his tablet of engineer’s graph paper to take notes. He had to gather all the information first. How else would an engineer decide what to buy?

When the salesman saw that distinctive yellow pad, he exclaimed: “Oh my God, another guy from NASA!” and refused to do business with him.

Ross chuckles about his story and concedes that “in the big scheme of things, that is a stress that you might not want to expose yourself to your whole life.”

Perhaps that scrupulous attention to every teeny, tiny detail is justified by the high stakes.

After a recent launch attempt, he says, “we got a report card in about four minutes on about three years’ worth of work.”

But that’s what makes it fun, contend Joe Padavano and Chris McKelvey of Orbital Sciences Corp. in Fairfax, Va. Their firm is designing a new rocket, the Taurus. (No word yet on Ford’s interest in the name. Since the Defense Department is buying it, maybe the Feds can use whatever name they want.) Padavano, 33, is program manager for the Taurus and McKelvey, 28, is his deputy.

The rocket will be 90 feet tall, 92 inches in diameter (that’s almost eight feet, for all you non-rocket scientists) and will weigh 140,000 pounds gassed up and ready to fly. It’s goal is to launch a 3,000-pound satellite from an airport runway with about a week’s lead time--after all the usual launch sites have been atomized by thermonuclear war.

Padavano and McKelvey like seeing the “quick, tangible” results of their work, and they have no illusions about its glamour.

“We don’t invent things, we turn wrenches,” says Padavano, who has a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics engineering from MIT. “Half the job is not blackboards full of equations, it’s that when you buy a bolt that’s a quarter-inch in diameter, it might be closer to five-sixteenths, and the hole you drilled might be a little undersized. Meanwhile, you’ve got a customer waiting for this thing to get up in the air.”

That kind of immediacy can cause panic. Or it can bring out an inner strength. Asked what he does on the weekend, Padavano replies: “What’s a weekend?” With periodic design reviews, and launch a year away, he says, “we work a lot.”

McKelvey says she spends her weekends “getting in shape for the next week” with tennis, volleyball, golf, skiing, “whatever the season is.”

Friends sometimes ask if she can fix their TV sets, but she turns them down. So there’s one thing that not every rocket scientist can do.

In fact, says McKelvey, who has a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Notre Dame and a master’s in mechanical engineering from George Washington University, “I’m not sure I know any ‘rocket scientists.’ ”

She sees herself as part of a team working to put together a product.

“There are a lot of people in the program with specific areas of expertise,” she says, and they team up to form the rocket. Propulsion, electrical, computer, mechanical components--everyone takes a little segment of it. “They all have a different asset that they bring to the program.”

No wonder nobody understands rocket science; it takes too many people to do it.

Werner Dahm, chief of the aerophysics division in the Structures and Dynamics Laboratory at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., agrees with that principle--teamwork. At Marshall for 44 years, he came to the United States from Germany shortly after World War II.

He says that teamwork was the main strength of Werner von Braun, the German scientist who practically invented rocket science at Marshall after the war.

“He had the capability to make everyone feel like a member of the team. Even the people from the shop--they all felt like they were members of the team, they were enthusiastic.”

Dahm, 74, worked on the Redstone rocket in the early 1950s, the Jupiter ballistic missile, the Pershing I and the various versions of the Saturn rocket that eventually sent men to the moon. Teamwork was especially important on the Saturn project, he says, because he worked only on the first stage. “The other two were done by other companies around the country.”

Wait a minute. A simple thing like teamwork? Is that all there is to it? Don’t rocket scientists have some sort of insight that other people lack?

“I think we do,” Dahm says. “We try to analyze and to understand.

“In fact, something you have to have is curiosity. What is behind things? The unknown matters you’re dealing with. How does it work?”

Differing slightly from Ross, of the NASA center in Cleveland, Dahm thinks “you cannot restrict yourself to standard, established methods. Often enough, you have to develop your own. In the early years, in the early ‘50s, there was not much available.”

In fact, Dahm is working today on a problem that has baffled scientists since the ‘50s. He calls it “the transition between two flows of different speed, for the flow behind the missile.” As the rocket rises through the atmosphere, its nose piercing the air, the blunt end leaves behind a wake of recirculating air. He wants to know: At what point does the flow become turbulent?

His first step was to gather all the information he could find on the subject. Then he will use the curiosity that his first American colleague, who left the program after three years “to work with people,” saw in him long ago.

“He said to me: ‘For this work, you have to have a curiosity. And you have that,’ ” Dahm recalls. “You have to be curious about what is behind the things you’re dealing with. How can I solve it?”

Well, there it is. Teamwork, with each person concentrating on a specific, detailed part of the process, and each having the intellectual curiosity to figure out just what’s going on. That’s rocket science.

One last question: Can you program a VCR?

“With a manual,” Dahm replies.