In Alabama: the Right Stuff

By LANCE MORROW

The launch went well. The space shuttle Discovery lifted off with a jolt and rapid rat-a-tat-tatting blast, then some roll and yaw and another jolt. The solid-rocket boosters fell away, and the shuttle climbed up out of the atmosphere. Soon the mission commander and pilot saw the earth's curved horizon before them in the orbiter's front window. The crew, dead serious now in the early moments of the flight, proceeded in efficient monotones through checklists, opening and closing switches, scanning the warning lights on the cockpit panels, coordinating with mission control. Fourteen minutes into the flight, Houston relayed a message of congratulations from the President, written in robust Rose Garden prose.

Then the flight grew livelier. Things went wrong by the alphabet. The RCS (reaction control system) locked in the firing position. The GPC (general purpose computer) went down. Fire broke out in the APB (aft payload bay). Mission Commander Larry Cerier of Chicago and Pilot Bill Parker of Friendswood, Texas, worked out the problems coolly. The right stuff. They even got a little cocky. They began to try out banter over the radio in the style of deadpan macho that astronauts affect. When the fire started, Parker took emergency steps (activating switches to spray the area with a chemical fire retardant) and offered a nonchalant little witticism: "Uh, that's a roger, Houston . . . We have standby marshmallows on board." The mission calmed down and Commander Cerier improvised in low-key astronautical style: "It's a pretty view from up here . . . Looks like Miami's going to have a nasty shower, Houston."

Collective fantasy play is fascinating. Four-year-olds display a genius for it, but their parents usually have trouble managing the suspension of disbelief. The adults flying the shuttle mission at the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala., however, gave themselves up to an absorbing hallucination of adventure: Walter Mitty in zero gravity. Most of them fell into their roles with amazing and rather endearing conviction. They put on powder blue NASA flight suits and duck-billed hats with gold braid on them. They threw themselves into training. When it came time for their shuttle missions, they imitated precisely the cadences and vocabularies they had heard so many times on television beaming in from their weightless heroes. "That's affirmative," one camper would say, all business, laconic: "You are a go for nominal de-orbit burn." They caught just right the astronaut's modulations of stoical understatement and occasional jubilant gee whiz. "We're bringin' this bird home!" the commander of one mission cried when he was go for re-entry.

The Space Camp is part of the Alabama Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, a showcase with museum, theater and "rocket park" that Wernher Von Braun developed in 1970 in connection with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center nearby. The camp has been open for several summers to young people ages ten to 16. Now for the first time, it is open to adults. They can come to the camp, at a cost of $350 each, to spend three days hearing lectures on space flight, getting a sampling of astronaut training and flying missions in the camp's simulated space shuttle.

The first group of adult campers, 38 of them, included a minister, an oral surgeon, two pathologists from Massachusetts General Hospital, an Ohio housewife, several dentists, a handful of amateur pilots and a dozen notable paunches. The campers joked a lot about being kids who never grew up. They spoke wistfully of how they had always wanted to be astronauts--"and this is the closest I'll ever come to it." Jerry Hill, director of marketing and sales for a company in Georgia, came with his wife Joanne Warger-Hill, a flight-attendant supervisor for Delta Air Lines. They feel a patriotic fervor about the space program. "We know that America is No. 1 in space," said Jerry. "It shows what Americans like to do, which is to be a leader openly and aggressively." Said Joanne: "It is taking a challenge, attacking the future."

The camp offered the adults a choice of staying at local motels or in the dormitories that the children use at the camp. All the adults chose to stay in the dormitories--large rooms filled with bunk beds. They shook their heads a little ruefully in the morning about the symphonic snoring. "Oh, well," said one, "it's like the Army." Except that no one bothered to make his bed.

The campers were kept awake much of the first night by the noise of a film crew moving heavy equipment on the floor above. The movie people were finishing the shooting of a movie called Space Camp, scheduled for release next spring. It is an adventure about a group of kids from the space camp who wind up on a real shuttle mission and have to make their way back to earth from space.

The food was not wonderful either, but overall the complaints were insignificant compared with the pleasures of mastering the Five Degrees of Freedom Chair (a contraption used in training for extra-vehicular activity) and the MMU (the manned maneuvering unit, a chair on the end of a long boom, also used in training for work outside the spacecraft).

On the first day, the campers took a general information test that would determine the roles they would play in the shuttle missions that were the culmination of the weekend. Then they listened as Konrad Dannenberg, one of Von Braun's old rocketeers from the Peenemunde days, paced a stage and lectured on the physics of what he calls "pro-pul-zhun." An emphatic man who looks like Victor Borge without the smile, Dannenberg spoke dispassionately about the "performance" of the V-2 rocket, which was one of Von Braun's creations during World War II. In the audience among the campers, Raymond Lobjois listened with a look of astonished recollection. "When I was a boy in Rheims," Lobjois said later at lunch, "I remember that just at dusk, every night, the Germans would send the V-2 rockets over, heading for England. But we were terrified. We knew that they often fell short. I remember their noise exactly." And here Lobjois pursed his lips and made a hum of satanic resonance through his nasal passages.

Lobjois came to the U.S. as an immigrant in 1960 and eventually opened two & bakeries in Los Angeles. He has always loved things American, and especially the space program. During his second shuttle mission of the weekend, Lobjois was given the job of communications officer. As the crew and mission control listened on the headphones, Lobjois' creamy French accent came over the air, offering commentary on the flight, caressing the NASA jargon. Maurice Chevalier as Chuck Yeager. The more characteristic accent of the weekend belonged to Alabama, one camp official lecturing earnestly on space "mah- jools."

The shuttle missions were tightly orchestrated, with half the team working in mission control and the other half aboard the shuttle simulator. Those in the shuttle flew the craft, performed scientific experiments (one had to take a sample of his own blood and test it for glucose), and went outside to complete extra-vehicular tasks using the Five Degrees of Freedom Chairs and the MMU. The counselors agree that the adults were more serious and professional about their tasks than the kids are.

The last afternoon of the camp, Astronaut William Pogue, who was in space for 84 days aboard Skylab during the 1970s, came to deliver a sort of commencement address. One might think that a man that long in space might remember some of the enchantments and wonder of it. Pogue does, of course. But he is also the author of a book called How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space? Pogue, an earthy man, told the campers that weightlessness makes your face look funny and your stomach feel awful. It is also a pain to take a shower up there, he testified.

But for the campers, the romance remained intact. Allen Garber, a 31-year- old paramedic from Boulder, went through the weekend with a look of bruised wonder in his eyes. "When I was a kid," he said, "I thought I could become an astronaut." Then he added sadly, "As I got older, I became more realistic."