
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 10, 1995                   TAG: 9507100065
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NUTTIN' TO DO

"APOLLO 13" opens in movie theaters, reminding the nation of a time when the U.S. space program still held the world entranced; when the flat, droning communications between Earth and space were spellbinding; when to be an astronaut was to be a cowboy, an explorer and a jet pilot all in one, riding a bronc to the moon and back and splashing down a hero.

The flight told of in the movie, of course, was a disaster - an oxygen-tank explosion crippled Apollo 13 200,000 miles out in space, threatening to leave its crew adrift to die when the oxygen and water ran out. Such an outcome was simply unthinkable 25 years ago, and the NASA ground crew worked round the clock for days to figure out how to bring the men home.

They did it - and turned failure into a shot of can-do spirit for a nation that did not yet seriously doubt it could fix any problem.

Contrast the heroic ending of that drama with the calamitous explosion of space shuttle Challenger: no chance for the nation's best minds to calculate a fix; a simple human error, an explosion and an entire crew obliterated. A cause and its inevitable consequences. The Earthbound could only watch, horrified and helpless.

By then, of course, the space program already had lost a good deal of its glamour along with its air of danger - a mistaken public perception, as it turned out. But it seemed less like a pioneering push into unknown territory than an increasingly routine truck run across country.

Now, astronaut-physician Norman Thagard returns from almost four months aboard the Russian space station Mir to say his space odyssey was, well, rather trying. And not in any heart-pounding way that would make a good adventure movie.

The food was bad, the recordkeeping tedious, news from Earth practically nonexistent, and it was lonely, despite the company of a couple of Russian cosmonauts. Thagard complained that he had no one to speak with in English for days at a time, and he missed his family. He wasn't sure he could have stood the isolation for, say, six months.

If there is no romance in Thagard's assessment, there is practical value for a space program looking toward longer missions - and a certain appropriateness to this time.

by CNB