Anonymity Is Not an Option for Crew

One is as famous as a rock star in his native Japan. Another is a veteran military pilot once rejected as undersized for a Russian space flight. A third is an Air Force colonel who is about to take her fourth trip into space but admits to a terror of roller coasters.

To one another, they are known as “Squeegee,” “Too Short” and “Mom.” To the rest of the world, they and their colleagues are a bunch of not-quite-average Americans, plus a Japanese, who will be the first to take the teeth-rattling ride into orbit since the Columbia space shuttle accident about 2 1/2 years ago.

As ambassadors for a humbled NASA, the seven-member crew of Discovery -- scheduled to launch Wednesday -- has become the most photographed and interviewed set of spacefarers in nearly two decades.

Past crews sometimes found dealing with the media irritating. This one appears to have embraced the attention. “We are aware that the whole world is watching,” said Eileen Collins, 48, the shuttle’s commander who is also known as Mom.

The crew has seized the platform to urge the public and the government not to lose faith in manned space travel because of its risks.

To Collins, astronauts are a lot like ancient seafarers who went searching for new lands in rickety wooden ships. “I believe space exploration is safer than what people were doing hundreds of years ago,” she said.

But their roles as cheerleaders for space exploration has not prevented Discovery’s crew from being among the most outspoken in the history of the space program. The astronauts have not been shy about publicly questioning their superiors, something that almost never happened in the old, buttoned-down NASA.

Discovery’s crew has talked and talked. Crew members have appeared on “Good Morning America,” “Today” and a Discovery Channel documentary. International media, particularly from Japan and Australia, where mission specialist Andrew Thomas was born, have dogged their every step.

Some of them, such as flight engineer Stephen Robinson, known as “Stevie Ray” because he plays guitar in a band, have seen it all before.

“I was on the John Glenn mission,” said Robinson, referring to the highly publicized 1998 shuttle trip taken by the former astronaut and Democratic senator from Ohio.

An astronaut since 1995, Robinson, 49, had been trying to get himself aloft since he was 13, when he built his own hang glider and launched himself from the California hilltops. While a student, he started working at NASA’s Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Calif., later specializing in fluid physics research and aerodynamics at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Others, such as Soichi Noguchi, a 40-year-old Japanese astronaut whose call sign is Squeegee, are learning how to deal with the hoopla of spaceflight.

As one of Japan’s eight astronauts -- four of whom have flown in space -- Noguchi is a celebrity back home. “It’s like the 1960s in the U.S.” when astronauts were larger-than-life embodiments of a nation’s technological prowess, he said.

At a recent news conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, two pop stars from Japan attended. Japanese photographers divided their time between shooting pictures of Noguchi on stage and then swiveling in their seats to snap images of elaborately coiffed rockers from the band SMAP.

An aeronautical engineer by training, Noguchi has one of the riskier roles in the mission. He is one of two crew members scheduled to perform a space walk to test repair techniques for the shuttle’s insulating tiles.

Noguchi said his wife and three daughters were worried about the mission after the Columbia accident. He said he had tried to reassure his family, and hadn’t wavered in his desire to go. “This is my dream,” he said.

The focal point of this diverse crew is Collins, a former Air Force pilot who has made three trips into space, accumulating 537 hours in orbit.

Her resume includes a number of firsts for a female astronaut. A veteran of the 1990 astronaut class, she was the first female shuttle pilot, as well as the first female commander of a shuttle flight.

“I hope I can be a model to young women,” Collins said. Though recognizing her gender “may be meaningful to the rest of the world,” she said, it’s not a big deal to her.

Her only concern when she takes the controls is “the $2-billion spacecraft in my hands.”

Collins does have a quirk: She’s terrified of roller coasters. She was riding Space Mountain, an indoor roller coaster at Disneyland, some years ago when her fear surged in a way it never had while absorbing the G-forces from rocketing into space at 17,000 mph.

“You can’t see anything,” Collins explained. “I thought, ‘I am never doing that again.’ ”

At the controls of the shuttle orbiter, her attitude is totally different. “I have no nerves, no emotion, no pressure,” she said.

The difference might be that “we have a good amount of control over what we’re doing” in space, she said. Plus, the trip “has a purpose.”

But that’s just a guess. “Maybe a psychologist could figure it out,” said Collins, whose call sign honors her maternal role with her crew as well as with her two children.

The other woman aboard is Navy Capt. Wendy Lawrence, a helicopter pilot who has made 800 ship landings and is a mission specialist on Discovery.

Aviation is something of a family business. Her grandfather and father flew aircraft in wartime. Both were shot down, her grandfather in World War II and her father in Vietnam. Her father didn’t return home for six years.

“My family understands the risks” of flight, she said.

Lawrence, 46, was tagged with her nickname when she volunteered to travel to the Russian space station, Mir. The Russians at first turned her down because she was about 2 inches under the minimum height allowed on the station. A colleague was turned down for being too tall. Lawrence and her companion became linked in NASA lore as Too Short and Too Tall.

“We were both Russian rejects,” she said.

The Russians eventually allowed both on board.

After a 2 1/2 -year hiatus in shuttle flights, there is a palpable hunger among the astronauts to return to space.

Mission specialist Thomas, an astronaut since 1992, has picked out CDs to provide soothing listening in space, focusing on “the three Bs

Thomas, who has made three flights into space, said manned spaceflight was as important for the nation as for the astronauts’ personal dreams and ambitions.

“This country prided itself on human spaceflight,” the 53-year-old mechanical engineer said. “You can’t leave these vehicles sitting on the ground.”

But for all the gung ho talk of space travel, the Discovery astronauts have been unusually candid in their criticism of NASA and the shuttle program.

Unlike past generations of astronauts, they have made it clear they are unwilling to be the smiling public face of NASA when they are the ones putting their lives on the line.

Mission specialist Charles Camarda surprised reporters several months ago when he said he had doubts about the insulating-tile repair kits that would be tested during the Discovery mission. Rather than attempt a repair, he said he would prefer to wait in the International Space Station for a rescue.

Camarda, who is to make his first trip into space, emerged from NASA’s technical and academic ranks, instead of its pilot corps. He holds seven patents and has been a research scientist on many shuttle programs.

Discovery pilot James Kelly, known as “Vegas” because of his poker skills, said that even before the Columbia accident, he sensed a malaise in NASA’s culture. “There were things that bothered me about the way we did things,” Kelly said. “I was surprised how many meetings ended with consensus. Either you agreed or you were hammered down so you didn’t talk.”

He hasn’t spared himself either. “I consider the Columbia [accident] partly my fault,” said Kelly, 41. Over the years “I saw hits to the [insulating] tile. If my F-15 came back like that I would have been screaming bloody murder. But I was dumb enough to believe it was OK.”

Kelly was 5, growing up in a small town in Iowa, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969. Kelly recalls his father pointing into the night sky and declaring that a man was walking on that glowing silver satellite. Then and there, Kelly decided he would become an astronaut. He has logged 3,000 hours in 35 kinds of aircraft and piloted Discovery to the space station in 2001.

“There’s a lot of things we need to keep changing,” he said of NASA’s culture. “But we have a good enough report card to fly this flight.”