Hometown in Orbit Over Astronaut’s Achievements

Scott Horowitz is up there orbiting the Earth at 17,000 mph on a risky mission to fix the international space station.

But down here, in the comfort and safety of this bedroom community, his father is as cool as a cucumber.

“He was trained to do this job,” Seymour Horowitz said rather matter-of-factly of his son the astronaut, who is piloting the space shuttle Atlantis, which blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center eight days ago. “If he wasn’t good enough, NASA wouldn’t put him in the seat.”

Scott Horowitz is second in command on this shuttle flight, sharing piloting duties with mission commander James Halsell Jr.

Maybe the 43-year-old Horowitz has the right stuff because, in a way, the Newbury Park High School graduate went into the family business.

Following his father’s footsteps, the oldest son also joined the military and earned a doctorate in engineering. And like his dad, he learned to fly a private plane at an early age.

“He had his pilot’s license before he learned to drive,” Seymour Horowitz said recently during an interview at his home.

“Actually, all three of my sons have PhDs in engineering,” said the 74-year-old Horowitz, a retired Navy chief who works for the defense contractor Litton Industries at Los Angeles Air Force Base near LAX.

“We had a bit of a can-do attitude in the household I grew up in,” said Horowitz’s youngest son, Evan, who works for Boeing Co.’s commercial aircraft division in Seattle.

Seymour Horowitz raised his sons alone after their mother left them in 1970 to pursue a writing career. Horowitz married his second wife, Rose, in 1978.

Because all the males in the family had strong technical aptitudes, Evan Horowitz said, they believed they could master any challenge. “We are engineers,” he said. “Give us a set of blueprints, and we’ll make you anything.”

The family “was what people used to call squares,” said Seymour.

Scott Horowitz’s childhood friend Chuck Blat said he met the future astronaut and Air Force colonel when they were seventh-graders at Redwood Middle School in Thousand Oaks. Blat said he was often a little intimidated by the mental titans at the Horowitz home, then on Fordham Avenue in one of the city’s original subdivisions.

“We’d be in the family room working on building a model plane, when Scott would start talking with his dad about airfoils, which I think is the degree of the curve on the top of the wing,” said Blat, who works as a branch manager for GTE. “I’d just try to act intelligent and nod at the right time.”

Blat, who took his wife, Cheryl, to the east Florida coast May 19 to witness the shuttle launch, said his friend was always the smartest kid in the class.

“Scott raised the curve on all the tests, and you hated him for it,” said Blat, 42.

But despite his academic success, the future astronaut did not spend his entire adolescence with his nose buried in books, said Blat. He recalls a teen who loved to build model planes and set off model rockets.

And back in the late 1960s and ‘70s, when Thousand Oaks had far fewer residents, they’d ride their bikes into Westlake Village late at night, sometimes to launch model boats on the man-made lake. Blat said his buddy also rebuilt sports cars and played the trombone in the high school marching band.

“He was a lot of fun,” Blat said.

Eric Horowitz, 39, agreed, saying his astronaut brother was far from being nerdy.

“He was popular in high school,” he said. “He went out, he hung out.”

No one in the Horowitz family seems to remember Scott’s talking about becoming an astronaut when he was a kid.

“If he said it, it didn’t register,” said Eric Horowitz. “I mean, I talked about being a fireman.”

Only after the space shuttle program was introduced in 1978 did Scott pursue the career, they said.

But apparently Scott, who lives in Houston with his wife, Lisa, and 4-year-old daughter, Arielle, confided such a dream to his sixth-grade teacher at Acacia School in Thousand Oaks.

The shuttle pilot has credited retired teacher Wendell Smith with being his inspiration, and he keeps a yearbook autograph from his mentor addressed “to one of the future astronauts” in his scrapbook.

Horowitz has taken mementos from the school along on his three shuttle flights, said Acacia teacher Sharon Sickler.

On his first mission, aboard the shuttle Columbia in 1996, he took his own sixth-grade photo. One year later, Sickler’s fifth-grade class gave him an American flag to carry on the shuttle Discovery.

This time, Sickler’s class gave him an all-class photo and a video CD-ROM featuring students dancing to tunes by the Beach Boys.

“He carried that in his hip pocket,” said Sickler.

She said her class is excited about the latest mission. Students have brought in newspaper clippings in the past week describing repairs to the space station, which had been slowly losing altitude and battery power.

“The kids are really jazzed about it,” said Sickler, who has a bulletin board in class tracking the mission, which is scheduled to conclude Monday. The students also check NASA’s Web site for the latest information on the repairs, she said.

Science buff Erik Mulick, 11, said he was closely following the mission, in part, because the pilot is from his hometown.

“A teacher from this school told Scott Horowitz to follow his dreams,” Eric said during a brief break in class. “And he did.”

Astronauts have installed fresh batteries and boosted the space station’s orbit using Atlantis’ steering thrusters. The station is now about 230 miles above Earth, in perfect position to receive Russia’s service module. Once the module arrives, the station can be enlarged and a permanent crew moved in.

The shuttle was expected to undock from the space station Friday evening after nearly a week of linked flight.

As they do for all of Scott’s launches, the Horowitzes, as well as members of the extended family, packed the launch site last week, family members said.

“Everybody should see a launch at least once,” said Rose Horowitz, Scott’s stepmother. “I can’t think of anything that compares. My insides shake.”

Still, she said, she’s always nervous until the liftoff is over.

“That’s just a little carry-over because of the Challenger explosion,” she said.