THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 15, 1997 TAG: 9701150486
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LARRY MADDRY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 88 lines
As the space shuttle Atlantis inched closer to the Russian space station Mir on Tuesday night while 240 miles above Earth, it was bringing a pair of former Norfolkians together.
NASA astronaut John E. Blaha - a 1960 Granby High School graduate who has been living on the Russian station since September - and Norfolk native Peter ``Jeff'' Wisoff were expected to join other astronauts in a moving chore once the two spacecraft are linked and the hatches opened between them.
The Shuttle docked with Mir as scheduled, around 11 p.m.
Blaha and Wisoff will work with five Atlantis astronauts and the two Russian cosmonauts aboard Mir to move 3,600 pounds of supplies from the shuttle to the space station.
During their time aloft, the two men will have plenty of time to reminisce about their Norfolk connections. Atlantis and Mir, which have previously docked four times, will be joined in orbit for five days.
Blaha, the third NASA researcher to live on the Mir space station, carried a Granby T-shirt and ball cap along for his four-month stay.
In late December, Blaha, 54, who also attended Norfolk's Mary Calcott Elementary School, talked with students from Granby and Mary Calcott via a computer monitor linked to an amateur radio station at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton.
Asked by a fourth-grader how he spent his spare time, the retired Air Force colonel replied that his spare time is usually over meals shared with Russian cosmonauts.
``We sit around the table and we prepare food together and we laugh and we tell stories,'' Blaha, a Texas native, explained.
Before the two spacecraft separate this weekend, shuttle astronaut Jerry Linenger will switch places with Blaha.
Wisoff, 39, is a physicist who was valedictorian of his 1976 class at Norfolk Academy. Now a veteran astronaut, he's chief mission specialist aboard the Atlantis.
While in space, he and the two other mission specialists will conduct a series of experiments including a study of the effects of low space gravity on plants, bacteria and insects.
Like Blaha, Wisoff is intensely loyal to his Norfolk school. He carried a Norfolk Academy pennant on one of his flights aboard the space shuttle Endeavor and has spoken to students at his alma mater at least twice in the past four years. He is best known for his five-hour space walk from the Endeavor in 1993.
On that walk, he and fellow astronaut G. David Low wrestled two balky satellite antennae back into their original positions on a space laboratory - an event, NASA officials said, that proved the need for humans in space.
Wisoff received his doctorate in applied physics from Stanford University in 1986 and taught physics at Rice University before becoming an astronaut in 1991.
Wisoff's parents are from Norfolk. Dr. Carl P. Wisoff and his wife, Pat, were at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Sunday when Atlantis blasted off at 4:27 a.m., beginning a 66-hour chase of Mir around the world. Witnessing the launch with about a dozen Norfolk Academy graduates who are friends of the astronaut, Pat Wisoff said the lift-off was ``spectacular,'' the first time she's seen a launch in darkness.
``It was very bright, very beautiful, and absolutely perfect,'' she said, by phone from Cocoa Beach, Fla. on Tuesday. (Launch director Jim Harrington had joked that the shuttle was ``a little slow,'' missing the liftoff timetable by 42 milliseconds.)
Pat Wisoff said her son and Blaha have known each other for some time and will doubtless have plenty to talk about during the mission and their return about Atlantis. NASA plans for the space shuttle to land on Wednesday.
Pat Wisoff proudly recalled her son's early interest in science and the time he confounded her by collecting micrometeoroids from the roof of their home.
``He was also interested in rockets as a boy,'' she said. ``He built rocket models, and my husband would take him to Larchmont playground to shoot them off. He and his friend Bill Hagan - a good friend who came down for the launch - used to spend hours watching the night sky with a telescope when they were young.''
The physicist-astronaut's friend and Norfolk Academy classmate Lee Guerry, now a lawyer with The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, was at the early Sunday launch.
``We're all so proud of Jeff,'' she said. ``It's amazing to think what he's doing. And funny, when you remember all the silly things we did in high school and realize he's the chief mission specialist aboard.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Peter ``Jeff'' Wisoff
John E. Blaha
KEYWORDS: ASTRONAUTS SPACE SHUTTLES ATLANTIS