U.S. Woman Will Spend Months in Mir

American astronaut Shannon Lucid, who has been around the world a few times, is ready to set off Friday to spend nearly five months in a cluttered orbiting apartment with a couple of guys named Yuri, eat lots of canned fish and almost incidentally set an American record for endurance in space.

“I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be really different,” said Lucid, 53, who will leave Kennedy Space Center aboard the shuttle Atlantis for a rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir. The launch was rescheduled Wednesday after high winds at Cape Canaveral forced a 24-hour delay in liftoff.

The historic mission will mark several firsts for Lucid, a biochemist and one of the original group of female astronauts who joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1978. Not only will Lucid be the first American woman to live on Mir and set a record for time in orbit but she also will become the first American woman to go into space five times.

During the space shuttle’s scheduled third docking with the Russian space station this weekend, Lucid will inaugurate a two-year period of continuous American presence aboard the distant Russian outpost. NASA astronaut John E. Blaha, an Air Force pilot, is scheduled to take her place in early August.

Both Lucid and Blaha recently completed a year of training at Russia’s Star City cosmonaut center, where they concentrated on learning Russian. Lucid admitted that her Russian language skills are rudimentary but said that she anticipates no communication problems with Mir commander Yuri Onufrienko and flight engineer Yuri Usachev. She and the two Russians became well-acquainted before she watched them rocket into space last month.

The Atlantis and its six-member crew are to meet up with the Mir space station, hook up and remain attached for five days. On the agenda are joint experiments and procedures designed to aid the assembly of an international space station being developed by several nations--including the United States, Russia and Japan--and the European Space Agency. Two American astronauts, Linda Godwin, a physicist, and Army Lt. Col. M. Richard Clifford, are to take a spacewalk to attach four experiments to the outside of Mir.

The Atlantis is to return to the Kennedy Space Center in nine days, without Lucid. “Frankly, I was surprised that something I volunteered for and wanted to do actually happened, because that’s generally not the way historically that it has worked,” said Lucid of her selection for the Mir mission.

Lucid was born in 1943 in Shanghai, China, where her father was a Baptist preacher and her mother a missionary nurse. Six weeks after her birth she and her parents were interned by the Japanese in a prison camp, where they were held for several months. The family settled in Oklahoma after World War II.

“When I was a little girl, I was very interested in being a pioneer, like in the American West,” she said. Born too late for that, however, Lucid turned her attention to science fiction and that led her to the notion of exploring space.

“Of course, when I talked to people about this, they thought that would be rather crazy, because that was long before America even had a space program,” Lucid said. “So I just think it’s pretty remarkable that things turned out the way they did.”

The first American to live aboard Mir was astronaut Norm Thagard, who last year spent 110 days as a guest of the Russians and later complained mightily of the food, boredom and cultural isolation. He also lost 18 pounds.

Lucid is prepared. Books and other small gifts from her husband, Michael Lucid, a petrochemist in Indianapolis, and her three grown children, are already aboard Mir, having been dropped off by the crew that picked up Thagard.

Lucid also plans to use a laptop computer to communicate with her family via e-mail. And she has developed a taste for a variety of Russian and NASA foods.

Working a normal five-day week, Lucid also expects to be kept busier than was Thagard. She will conduct a series of science experiments.

Gen. Yuri Glazkov, deputy commander of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia, said at a NASA news conference that he expects Mir to be a neater place with Lucid aboard “because we know that women love to clean.”

Lucid has other ideas. She said that she will also make detailed notations on how she reacts to long-duration spaceflights. Why? Lucid was asked.

“Because I would like to see us be able to make interplanetary flights,” she said. “I’d like to see us plan to fly to Mars.”

Researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.