The Rational Stuff

By KARL VICK

Oct. 9, 1996 12 AM PT

THE WASHINGTON POST

HOUSTON — Everything starts with the Mercury Seven, also known as the Magnificent Seven.

They zoomed around the Cape in white Corvettes. They cut up with Sinatra, water-skied with Jackie. They smoked, and when they wanted to stop smoking they lined their ashtrays with a film of gasoline, so anyone failing to quit failed in style.

They were the first Americans in space.

Reclining atop a Redstone rocket, the whole world watching, the launch delayed, Alan Shepard spoke for the group: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”

One of the old Mercury Redstones stands at the entrance to Johnson Space Center. It looks frightfully small. Before he pulls over to the curb beside it, Steve Smith signals his turn.

“That was 1961,” Smith shouts, out of the car in the darkness of a rainy night. He pivots and points to the mammoth Saturn V beside it, the booster rocket that launched men to the moon. Next to the Saturn, the Redstone looks like a Tootsie Roll. “That was 1969. We went from that to that in eight years.”

And in the 27 years since, we have come to this. The automobile idling at the curb is not a new Corvette but a 1988 Toyota hatchback. It contains a car seat, a half-dressed Barbie, two umbrellas and a wrapper from Wendy’s, where no clerk asked for an autograph when Steve Smith, astronaut, ordered his grilled chicken sandwich, side salad and milk.

“No one recognizes me,” the astronaut says. “A lot of people I meet, then I meet them again, they won’t remember me. They’ll remember I’m an astronaut, but they won’t remember my name.”

Smith shrugs. His smile looks self-conscious.

“They don’t care.”

He was the 200th American in space. Had he been in the front seat on his first shuttle flight two years ago, Smith would have been the 199th American in space. But another new astronaut had that chair, and that guy’s feet left Earth’s atmosphere a millisecond before Smith’s, which made Smith No. 200. This is how it works these days, when people go into space in groups of six and seven: Your place in history can depend on your seat assignment.

It’s not like it was.

Astronauts are less dashing, more staid--family men and women. Now that John Blaha has tucked himself into the Russian space station, finally relieving poor, beleaguered Shannon Lucid, Blaha’s wife plans to take advantage of his four-month absence by replacing the hardwood floors.

“Flying and drinking and drinking and driving”-- as Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book “The Right Stuff” (Farrar, Straus) summarized the swagger of the men in the first U.S.-manned space program--is no longer the order of the day.

It was a different time: a rocket smoking on a gantry, and the scratchy voice of someone counting backward from 10, and all things possible, good and bad.

Everyone--everyone--was watching to see what happened next because, without doubt, the space race was the greatest narrative of the modern age. Technically it was against the Soviets, but on a wider canvas--the widest imaginable--it was a competition with the limits of human achievement. And when, with the lunar landing of Apollo 11, America won it, the story was over.

We went to the moon five more times. John Young walked the ruins of a lunar volcano. When the Apollo 16 crew returned safely to Earth, he recalls, “we had several parades when nobody came to ‘em but us.”

The absence of a continuing story line did not, however, keep NASA from producing more and more protagonists. Today there are 154 astronauts, including the 53 who just entered training.

Some of them look like astronauts: chiseled features, bodies that hang inside their clothes like cables, gazes cleareyed and true. These tend to be the pilots--many, like the Mercury Seven, former test pilots. Others, however, look like physicists and computer specialists and engineers.

Thirty-one are women. Six are African American, six are Latino, five are Asian American, and 18 others are foreign astronauts working or training with the Americans.

Names? Some are easy to remember. Brent Jett. Winston Scott. And the flat-out greatest astronaut name of all, Willie McCool. Others are less memorable, like Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper.

It doesn’t matter.

“No one’s going to know your name,” says Eileen Hawley, the NASA liaison who fields all media inquiries for the astronauts at Houston. She stops herself, qualifies “no one.”

“There are little pockets,” Hawley says. “Your hometown is going to know.”

Steve Smith is smiling again. “I get to ride a rocket.”

He grew up dreaming of it. As a little boy in San Jose, Smith saw the launches, played astronaut with his friends, assembled the Revell models.

When Mrs. Crowell’s first-grade class had an “Exploring the Universe” drawing contest, Steve stapled a construction paper frame around a rendering of a space walker tethered to a still-firing rocket suspended between Earth and Saturn. The astronaut’s smile is a perfect U. His shoes are pink.

Thanks to his pack-rat parents, Smith still has the drawing. The evening he fishes it out for a visitor, he has to pick his way across a living room carpet scattered with the toys they also stashed away: There are a lot of cowboys and Indians standing on those little plastic bases. The silvery ones are the astronauts. His 4-year-old daughter plays with them.

Smith is 37, tall and wiry, but he looks more like an engineer than an aviator. When he was in space, the food he missed most was salad. His achingly wholesome diet is something other astronauts rib him about, and it may also be a way of making a dig at his goody-two-shoes manner, which can be a bit squeaky.

In 1982, right after finishing his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford--about the time he started a job at IBM, where his father spent his career--Smith saw the documentary “The Dream Is Alive.” Watching the film, he heard a voice. It was Walter Cronkite talking, as only Walter Cronkite can, about the space program. It made Smith want to be an astronaut all over again.

To become an astronaut, you must first fill out an application. In the 10 years it took NASA to accept his, Smith got married to Peggy Brannigan, a computer executive who does not remember where she was when Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module. When her husband-to-be told her he wanted to be an astronaut, she heard how many people routinely applied (thousands) and how many were taken (maybe 30) and wished him well.

On April Fool’s Day 1992, when he learned he would become an astronaut, Peggy was two months pregnant, and wary.

“Before I moved down here I told some friends I thought I was just going to disappear right into the wall,” she says. “Because I saw the movie ‘The Right Stuff’ and I saw the ladies with the big hair.”

The current reality has charmed her no end. Far from being shadowed by Life magazine, she has “a normal life.” Her husband goes to work, she goes into her home office and, at night, over dinner, they talk about their daughter and their jobs. For, bizarre as it may sound, in many ways a job is what being an astronaut has become.

The second-most-asked question concerns aliens. Have they seen any up there? This is generally asked seriously, so generally the answer is delivered seriously too: “Sorry. Not yet.”

The question asked most of all is how you go to the bathroom in space.

The answer waits behind a gray door in Building No. 5 of Johnson Space Center, to be opened only if there is not a red sign on it that indicates the space toilet is in use.

It’s a throne, all right. About chest-high including the base and footrests. Above each footrest is a clamp that swings over the thigh. The clamp is necessary because in space, of course, everybody is essentially weightless, and, of course, so is everything. When liquids are to be passed, this is not really a problem. Extending from the throne is a long plastic tube. Above the throne is a medicine chest containing little funnels. Each astronaut has his or her own funnel. The women’s are oval, the men’s deeper and sort of linear. The funnel, held against the astronaut, is clamped to the hose, and when a switch is thrown mild suction does the work of gravity.

The private business of men and women in space might not come up if their public business were a little more interesting. But you have to watch an hour of “Nova” to appreciate most of what anyone’s doing up there.

On Smith’s previous mission, it was mapping Earth’s subsurface with radar. His next mission will be to make significant improvements in the Hubble Space Telescope to improve its scientific capabilities.

Which might not excite Mr. and Mrs. America, but it does mean Smith will get to walk in space. Twice.

The luster is gone. Rank-and-file reporters do not shatter journalistic protocol by bursting into applause when you are introduced to them, as that horde in Washington did for the Magnificent Seven. When the new class of astronaut candidates was presented to the public this summer, only four reporters showed up.

What else is gone? The free cars. Those white Corvettes in which the Mercury Seven tore around were donated by a dealer who’d won the Indy 500.

“Wind in the hair! Lead in the pencil!” Jack Nicholson hollered in “Terms of Endearment,” roaring down Galveston beach.

Smith drives the beat-up Toyota because most days Peggy takes Shannon to school and the GMC Jimmy, their other car, is safer.

“He’s a good daddy,” Peggy says. When Smith’s first mission kept him out of town on his daughter’s birthday, the 200th man in space arranged to be patched through on the private line usually reserved for confidential chats between astronauts and the flight surgeon. Peggy held the receiver to the little girl’s ear.

Frank Borman read from the Book of Genesis from Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve; Steve Smith sang “The Barney Song” from STS-68 on the day Shannon turned 2.

Smith’s first assignment as an astronaut was an especially crucial one. He was responsible for signing off on the safety of the shuttle’s main engines and booster rockets, the parts that caused Challenger to explode.

In a craft powered by three engines, each with 50,000 parts, plus solid boosters that cannot be shut off once started, the possibilities for disaster are nearly endless. But there is one thing you really want to avoid, Smith learned: You never want to start the engines and then try to stop them.

In the final six seconds of the countdown, the six seconds it takes the engines to power up, dozens of valves begin to open, sending liquid hydrogen and oxygen cooled to 300 degrees below zero toward a combustion chamber where temperatures will reach 6,000 degrees above. If a sensor finds something amiss, computers will order the engines to shut down. But at that point, the astronauts are literally sitting on half a million gallons of fuel, and a match has been lit.

This was what Peg listened to at dinner when her husband talked about his job. She listened especially carefully in the fall of 1993, when Steve learned he would be the first member of his class to go into space. His launch was set for Aug. 18, 1994.

The six of them come out in their orange suits, wave at the cameras and climb into the “astrovan.” At the launch pad they ride elevators to the top of the gantry, climb into the orbiter Endeavour and lie down, facing the sky.

A NASA minibus picks up the families at their hotels and takes them to the seclusion of Launch Control. The days of spouses viewing launches within sight of the press ended with the Challenger disaster. Nowadays, the families watch from the roof. There, they cannot hear the public-address announcer. Nor can they see the huge digital countdown clock. But they have an excellent view of the shuttle on its pad.

Dawn is just breaking when Peggy takes her place. The white profile of the shuttle, three miles away, is eclipsed by the huge fuel tank the color of primer. At T minus six seconds the three main engines begin throttling up.

“We have a go for main engine start,” says the voice on the loudspeaker she cannot hear. “We have three main engines running.”

On the pad, the shuttle cabin vibrates furiously. Oxygen and hydrogen mix with spark.

“Three,” the announcer says.

“Two.” Flames are visible at the nozzles.

“One.”

Then, nothing. The shuttle stands there. Peggy sees smoke. She sees fire.

“We have a cutoff,” says another voice she cannot hear. Inside the shuttle, red lights flash across the flight deck. An alarm squeals. The Endeavour, which started to sway as soon as the engines began to power up, continues to sway, continues to shake furiously, though the rumble soon dies.

On the computer screens in front of Smith and the three men reclined around him, the immediate message is main engine failure. The crew starts moving. Harnesses come off. All loose items--manuals, mirrors, pencils--are stowed. Smith’s actions are so conditioned, his mind so occupied with carrying them out, that two minutes and 30 seconds pass before it occurs to him why they are necessary.

“This is an interesting situation,” he remembers thinking. “Maybe we should be scared.”

Which is another way of saying that, for a few seconds at least, you truly are.

“Because you have 550,000 gallons of cryogenic fuel six to eight feet from your feet. And you think, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of explosive capability here.’ ”

On the roof, Peggy is way ahead of him. The astronauts who escorted the families to their perch have immediately offered reassurances, words of comfort, inside information. But she knows as much as they do. The 2 1/2 minutes when her husband did not have time to think are 2 1/2 minutes when that is the only thing she cannot stop doing.

“Very scary,” she says later. “Very scary.”

Downstairs, Launch Control pinpoints the cause of the abort in seconds: A sensor on one of the turbo pumps inside the main engine took the temperature of the oxygen flying past it and found it higher than expected. Just slightly, they will learn later. No big deal.

But the sensor’s report triggered an automatic shutdown with 1.9 seconds remaining, closer to liftoff than any other shutdown, ever, so close that the display countdown went all the way to 00:00.

The astronauts remain aboard for almost an hour before the pad is deemed safe enough for members of the ground crew to approach and get them out.

Sometimes--almost all of the time, in fact--it is easy to forget that being an astronaut is, ultimately, about danger. The job attracts some mighty high achievers, and they are smarter and braver than most of us.

Most of us do not fly jet fighters. We will not walk in space and see our planet pole to pole as only a few hundred people have ever seen it.

Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of the modern space program is that it has made the astonishing seem commonplace.

The day after the aborted flight, a Friday, was one of the weirdest days of Steve Smith’s life. He got the day off. He spent it with his family at Epcot Center.

It wasn’t that no one recognized him. How could strangers know that the day before he may have come closer to becoming a household name than any astronaut since Challenger?

It was, rather, that one of the rides he took had a space theme. Rocket ships. The people around him were thrilled. Smith wasn’t.

He just kept looking up at the sky.