Record-Setting Astronaut Gets Down to Earth

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Since returning from a record-smashing six months in space, celebrity astronaut Shannon Lucid has been making the rounds.

Not the talk-show rounds. Not yet, anyway.

The bookstore rounds.

One of the things Lucid missed most while living on the Russian space station Mir was browsing through bookstores, so she’s making up for lost time.

“We landed on a Thursday, didn’t we? I was in the bookstore on Saturday,” Lucid said during a mid-November stop at the Kennedy Space Center, where she landed aboard shuttle Atlantis 48 days earlier.

She laughed hard, the same loud, hearty laugh that endeared her not only to Mir’s Russian cosmonauts but to landlubbers the world over who have never met her, and most probably never will, yet feel touched by this plain-spoken, middle-aged mother of three and missionaries’ daughter, this everywoman who craved chocolate, potato chips and cola in orbit and ended up with junk-food offers galore.

“I didn’t buy a whole lot that day,” Lucid confided.

How many books?

“Oh, about five or six. I don’t remember what I bought the first time. I’ve been back many times.”

Such is life-after-space station for NASA’s most valuable asset--reading, biking, going through stacks of mail at the office, and looking forward, never back.

“I guess I don’t spend a whole lot of time looking back” to Mir or anything else, said Lucid, one of NASA’s original female astronauts. “I’m generally looking forward to a flight.”

Then there’s the occasional trip to the White House--last Monday, for instance, when President Clinton awarded her the congressional Space Medal of Honor and called her a “determined visionary.”

Lucid put the mission in more down-to-earth terms: “The thing that symbolized the entire flight,” she said, was a chat she had with her Russian crewmates one evening as they were “floating around after supper.”

Her next spaceflight may be awhile in coming, however.

NASA officials want to make sure that the 53-year-old Lucid suffered no serious ill effects from her 188 days of weightlessness--a world record for a woman and a U.S. record for either sex--before assigning her to another spaceflight. She was supposed to spend only 140 days in space, but shuttle launch delays kept her waiting.

The doctors’ main concerns: bone and muscle loss, and radiation exposure. But by all accounts Lucid is doing well. Better, in fact, than anyone expected.

Readjusting to Earth’s gravity “was much, much better and easier than I had anticipated by a longshot,” she said.

Lucid bicycles around her Houston neighborhood whenever she gets the chance, though, until recently, most of her time was taken up with flight debriefings and medical tests. She’s even gone skating with her two daughters, in their 20s.

“I asked her husband to hide the Rollerblades for the first couple weeks,” said Dr. Gaylen Johnson, a NASA flight surgeon who monitored Lucid’s health throughout the flight. “But whatever she likes to do is fine with me.”

“Yeah, she did bounce back very quickly,” he added. “It depends on the individual. If you’re a triathlete and go into space for six months, you’re not going to come back at the same level you were before.”

Lucid, a 150-plus-pounder who loves to eat, is by no means an athlete. She spent two hours a day working out on Mir, mostly on the treadmill, to prevent excessive bone and muscle loss--doctor’s orders.

She disliked the treadmill so much she swore she’d never get on one again. But, evidently, all that exercise paid off.

Lucid surprised everyone when she walked off Atlantis on Sept. 26, minutes after returning to Earth. Johnson, figuring her muscles probably would be too limp to support her, met her with a stretcher. She brushed it aside and strolled, with some assistance, into an airport-style people-mover.

The next day, Lucid flew back to Houston and was welcomed by hundreds of NASA employees and other well-wishers, including the president.

She said she had no idea her return would cause so much commotion.

More than 400 people jammed into an IMAX theater at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center last month for a film and slide show-and-tell by Lucid and the five shuttle astronauts who brought her back. The crowd gave her a standing ovation; even her crewmates joined in.

Local elementary students later gave her a homemade quilt, decorated with a stitched alien, a shuttle and other space designs, as her crewmates waited patiently elsewhere.

“Oh, that is soooo nice. Thank you all soooo much,” Lucid told the children, some of whom wore T-shirts emblazoned with her photo and the words “Welcome Home Shannon.” One girl had Lucid autograph the back of her shirt.

Nearly 200 interview requests from reporters still are waiting to be answered. Except for one news conference and a few quick trips, including the White House visit Dec. 2, she’s pretty much keeping out of the spotlight.

“Obviously, we were up on Mir and we just talked to the people there in the Moscow [control center], so we didn’t get a feel for how the flight was really being perceived, I guess,” Lucid said. “And so it was pretty much of a surprise that so many people had become so involved in the flight.”

Lucid’s crewmates don’t mind being in her shadow. When she mentioned to reporters that her dream trip on Earth would be to go to Mongolia--”I haven’t been there and I’ve always wanted to go there”--shuttle commander William Readdy piped up, “And we’d like to carry her bags.”

They may carry her bags yet, to the future international space station.

A biochemist by training with “the best job in the world,” Lucid would love to fly to the station, once it’s built, and conduct more orbital experiments.

“My husband doesn’t want me to say that quite yet,” she said, smiling. “I haven’t been home that long yet.”