A New Breed of Astronauts
	Broward Liston on why this generation of space explorers is different — but still has the right stuff
	By Broward Liston

Posted Sunday, February 2, 2002; 10:31 a.m. EST
I once told Willie McCool that he had the best astronaut name since Gus Grissom. "Well, Gus Grissom was a great astronaut, and I don't mind being compared to him at all," said the rookie. Of course, he will be remembered along with Grissom now, both of them among the handful of astronauts who have died while strapped inside their spacecraft. But really, the comparisons only go so far. "Gruff Gus," as Tom Wolfe eulogized him in "The Right Stuff," clearly belonged to a post-war, no nonsense generation of aviators. Moments before he died in the Apollo 1 fire, Grissom was chewing out ground controllers for their incompetence  

McCool, on the other hand, with his spiky blond hair and laid-back grin, looked more like a skateboarder, or one of the rougher Backstreet Boys. No surprise, really, that his wife asked Mission Control to play John Lennon's "Imagine" for him in orbit, that just gave him the opportunity to wax on about how the world looked from space, with no borders, just one big planet  for everyone to share.

These were not your daddy's astronauts who died on Saturday. In the last 16 days of their lives, the seven-member Columbia crew exemplified a generational change. Space was fun, and they wanted us to know it. Space was dangerous, too, and they were certainly aware of that, but these were not 60s-era astronauts, stolidly mounting their way to the moon. They were, like a lot of us born since the Baby Boom began, fairly confident that wherever you end up, it is the journey that really matters.

Ilan Ramon was a Jew but not religious. Rick Husband, his commander, was a born-again Christian. He sometimes attended a church near Cape Canaveral where the preacher, remembering him on Sunday, made a point of saying that Rick was going to heaven, but "I don't know about the others." Still, the secular Jew and the Bible-thumping choirboy were closer than friends, really — they spoke of one another as family. The Ramons used to invite the Husbands over for Friday-night dinners — all the crew families, in fact — and the bonds cemented.

Ramon allowed himself become a symbol to Holocaust survivors everywhere — his mother survived Auschwitz — and he said some very solemn, very appropriate things in public, but at heart he was a joker, and Husband was happy to be his straight-man.

"Here's the Superman entry of the astronaut from Israel," teased Husband, as Ramon floated out of a tunnel and performed somersaults in the weightless environment on Columbia. Husband was narrating a kind of home video he had patched together in orbit. While the mission was technical, all about cell reproduction, flame fuels and molecular bonding, Husband's video was homey. It showed McCool, the pilot, taking out the trash; Laurel Clark bedding down for the night; Kalpana Chawla fixing breakfast in the galley. Every day Michael Anderson, a gentle soul, checked on the welfare of the rats, spiders, worms and other odd critters that flew with them.

The generational change is now fully complete. Something that's good is not "A-OK" but "most excellent." These astronauts gambol about in zero-g like children. They even begin to look more like children, since nothing ever sags in weightlessness, and fluids, no longer settling in the legs, give them cherubic faces. They grow playful and spend their free time learning to do things, like gobbling floating food without using their hands, things that will never serve them back on Earth. Clark and McCool had a giggle telling reporters how they vomited from space sickness. Clark, a naval medical officer, even volunteered that riding in submarines made her vomit, too. As it turned out, Ponce de Leon was right, there really was a fountain of youth in Florida, but its launch pad would not be built for another 450 years.

Inevitably, the Columbia crew will be ossified by the time NASA is done praising them. Once we make someone a hero, the more human details get fuzzy. If the great University of Chicago astrophysicist, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, was right, that we get the greatest benefit from applying our maximum effort at the very edge of our abilities, then the social evolution of astronauts is worth noting, because that is where they aim, for the very edge of human ability. Let us recall that the men and women who died on Columbia journeyed to that edge, and there they found more than the treasure trove of science they were dispatched to find. They also found the same things we struggle for on Earth, but not always hard enough. A little freedom. A little friendship. A little love.

After all, maybe they were not so different from those old Mercury astronauts, who gave their spacecraft names like Freedom 7 and Friendship 7. Love 7? That might have been asking a little too much from Gus.

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