In Space, but Down to Earth

Slowly, astronaut Rick Husband worked the rust off the roof of his Camaro, wearing a drenched T-shirt outside his home near the Johnson Space Center. Next came the copper-colored hood, soon so shiny it would blind you if the sun caught it right. He turned it into a mean muscle car, drove it for a while, even gunned the engine once or twice for friends.

Then he gave it to his pastor to raise money for his church.

Months before astronaut Laurel Clark strapped in to a seat on Columbia and shoved off for the stars, NASA gave her a set of cameras to capture images of space. Go practice, they told her, and she did -- taking photos of neighborhood children bobbing for apples at a Halloween party, then making copies for friends in her moms’ club.

Astronauts have always worn a certain humility -- a trained humility best embodied in the words Neil A. Armstrong spoke upon setting foot on the moon: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

In NASA’s early days, though, beyond their hero status, many of the astronauts were a rugged, rowdy bunch -- hard-working, hard-drinking mavericks and jet jockeys.

The space cowboy is gone.

The seven crew members who died when Columbia broke apart Saturday morning over Texas were part of a new breed.

Several had extensive experience flying military jets, but they were technically skilled bookworms at heart, scientists first and pilots second. The bulk of their training was in engineering, medicine and computers, and the vehicle they flew was not a rocket, but a soaring laboratory.

The nation’s space program was once dominated by white men. No longer. The Columbia crew was a diverse collection of men and women from three countries.

They sang in church choirs. Pilot Willie McCool was a former Eagle Scout who loved to play chess. Not long before Columbia lifted off, neighbors ran into Clark at the Kroger’s grocery store a couple of miles from NASA headquarters, buying milk.

“In the ‘60s, they were like rock stars. Not anymore,” said Deanna Eaton, who lives in Webster, Texas, near the Johnson Space Center. She sang in the Grace Community Church choir with Husband, a baritone, for a year before she learned he was an astronaut -- who would become the commander of the space shuttle Columbia.

“You would have never known who they were if you didn’t ask,” Eaton said.

Once in a while, young astronauts around Houston went to the Outpost Tavern, a dark, sagging World War II barracks-turned-bar off NASA Road 1. For generations, it had been a favorite watering hole in the space community.

But these days, the “kids” come in mostly for organized parties announcing the members of a new crew, just for tradition’s sake. Many drink Diet Coke and leave early, heading home to families. Combined, the seven men and women aboard Columbia had 12 children.

“During the splashdown days, when a mission was over, NASA Road was just about closed down, the party was so big,” said Sharon Aden, who owns the Outpost with her husband, Stan. “Now, you maybe don’t even know a mission has ended.”

The change is also evident at a barbecue joint called Fat Boys that sits along the main drag in Cape Canaveral, Fla., where Columbia was supposed to land Saturday. In the Mercury and Apollo days, astronauts used to pre-order racks of ribs and pitchers of beer so the refreshments would be waiting for them when they pulled up. Today, the proprietor says, “they’re all vegetarians.”

In short, Houstonians said proudly as they mourned the deaths of Columbia’s crew members Sunday, they were squares.

“They were common as dirt,” said Carl Lawrence, a Boeing engineer who works on the International Space Station and whose daughters often played with Clark’s 8-year-old son. “This was like an oasis for them. To the community, even with all these astronauts walking around here, it’s nothing after a while. It’s just like any other job. They just happen to go into space.”

In its early years, Johnson Space Center, like Edwards Air Force Base outside Los Angeles, was an unbearably hot wasteland that lured brash pilots with the promise of fast jets, outer space and danger, and left their families to languish in shoddy government housing with no air conditioning. Periodically, some of their wives packed up the kids and left, unable to bear the weather, the loneliness and the ever-present specter of death.

NASA worried even in its earliest days about the hard-living reputation of many test pilots who became astronauts. Space pioneer John Glenn once scolded young colleagues to live up to the image of an astronaut demanded by the public. Part of the change over the last 10 or 15 years is the result of conscious image-building by the agency.

Part of it is competition for coveted seats aboard a spacecraft, with hundreds of brilliant, fit candidates ready to take the place of anyone deemed a risk. Astronauts and the space program are considered valuable players in a dangerous world; in the hours after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, many were whisked to secret locations.

They are now national assets, and the public’s investment in them does not come cheap: It costs an estimated $3,000 per minute to keep an astronaut in space.

A watershed in the development of the astronaut corps came in 1978 when, with some reluctance, NASA hired its first payload specialist -- given a precious seat primarily for science.

Byron Lichtenberg had been an F-4 Phantom pilot, flying 138 combat missions over Vietnam. But his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology kept him from being welcomed into the flyboy fraternity. “It was the changing of the guard, and NASA struggled with how to handle us, how to deal with this new diversity among its astronauts,” said Lichtenberg, now a pilot for Southwest Airlines. “They said, ‘We have plenty of pilots. We have pilots with PhDs. We don’t need scientists.’ ”

The first scientists were not invited to the Monday morning meetings of pilots and mission specialists. Their offices at Johnson were not even in the same building. Lichtenberg spent more time at MIT, Cape Canaveral and other places than with his crewmates in the years before his first mission, to Skylab-1 in 1983.

The fliers’ attitude toward the scientists was reflected in a joke said to have been told by astronaut Alan Shepard at a pilots’ meeting. The joke was about a woman who told a store clerk she needed 10 yards of fabric to make a nightgown.

“Why so much?” the clerk asked. “Because my husband is a scientist,” the woman explained. “He’d rather look for something than find it.”

“For a long time we were like third-class citizens,” Lichtenberg said. “Pilots, then mission specialists, then payload specialists. But scientific experimentation was becoming the primary role of NASA.”

After the explosion of the Challenger in 1986, NASA sought to enhance cohesion in the astronaut ranks; crew members trained together for the final six to nine months before a launch. Meantime, scientists arrived fast and furious, and now comprise the bulk of the 200-odd astronauts in NASA’s pipeline.

The scientists have walked on the moon and in space. They have done everything except fly the shuttle, since under NASA rules only an active-duty military test pilot can do that. There was one scientist on each of the Skylab missions in the 1970s, and now they’re integrated into every mission. The lines have blurred: Some of the top scientists are also active-duty military officers.

The definition of “the right stuff” has changed, and not everyone in the space community is happy about it.

Betty Moore Grissom, whose husband, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, one of NASA’s original seven astronauts, died in the 1967 Apollo 1 fire in Florida, questioned whether the scientists on shuttle missions should even be called astronauts.

“We need more titles,” she said. “The ‘astronauts’ are the pilot and the commander. Just because I fly on an airplane doesn’t make me the pilot.”

Especially for longer flights and space station stays, “astronauts are selected much more now for being team players,” said space historian Andy Chaikin, author of “Man on the Moon.”

“There’s no room for the same kind of rugged individualism -- for loners, I should say -- that characterized the early astronauts,” Chaikin said.

In 1961, NASA chose a barren field south of Houston as the headquarters of its young space program. Project Mercury came first, and with it the first U.S. astronaut in space. When the three men aboard Apollo 13 had a “problem” in 1970, they called home to Houston. The space shuttle program came next, followed by the international space station.

Somewhere along the way, much of America lost interest. The space race wasn’t a race anymore, a Mars expedition wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, and building a space station to orbit Earth didn’t sound nearly as fun as swatting a golf ball half a mile on the moon.

But in Houston, space never lost its luster.

Here, the accessibility of modern astronauts has turned them into regular folks. Their top NASA salary is $86,974. Most live south of Houston, near the Johnson Space Center, in modest suburbs full of driveway basketball hoops where houses start at about $150,000.

They are neighbors who literally trade gardening tips over backyard fences, not superstars. And that, residents said, made the destruction of Columbia a profound personal loss.

They turned out Sunday morning to mourn at two altars.

At Grace Community Church, where Husband and payload commander Michael Anderson were members of the congregation, ushers added seating to handle the crowd.

Before he lifted off on Columbia, Husband had left Senior Pastor Steve Riggle a videotaped message in case anything happened to him. As two women embraced at the end of a nearby hallway, weeping on each other’s shoulders, Riggle played the tape Sunday morning. Listening to it, parishioners were reminded of Husband’s humility, and of how he kept his space work in perspective.

In the video, Husband recounted a long-ago conversation with God, who, he said, asked him what he desired. Husband said he replied that he wanted to be an astronaut. Husband said God told him there was a greater purpose to life and that he should “live life the way God intended it to be lived.”

“It was like a light went on,” Husband said on the videotape. “This thing about being an astronaut wasn’t as important as I thought it was.”

Many church members found it ironic that, while the nation once stopped to watch every time a spacecraft lifted off, it stopped to take notice this time only because of the accident.

“Triumph captures the attention of the world. But it doesn’t capture it like tragedy,” Riggle said in his sermon. “And tragedy leaves us with questions .... There are none of us here who have the guarantee of another tomorrow.”

They came to a second altar of sorts, too -- the gates of the Johnson Space Center. Hundreds of mourners gathered around balloons, cut bird of paradise flowers and signs reading “Next Stop, Heaven” and “You are our heroes.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Skip Moore, a mission control officer who works on the International Space Station.

“Way back when, nobody knew what the mold was, and the original astronauts made the mold,” he said. “But it has changed. They aren’t young daredevils anymore. They aren’t on a pedestal anymore, and they like it that way. But we still hold them in awe. They are still astronauts.”

*

Times staff writers Stephanie Simon, Matt Lait, John-Thor Dahlburg and Usha Lee McFarling contributed to this report.