Astronaut Conquers Fear, Years At 61, He’s About To Hurtle Into His Dream Job Again

The older he gets, the more frightened he is.

When Story Musgrave rockets into orbit on his sixth shuttle flight, he will become the oldest man ever in space. And he will be very, very afraid.

Considering all the risks he’s endured in his 61 years - an ex-Marine, he has logged 17,700 hours in airplanes and 500 parachute jumps - Musgrave feels lucky to be alive. His Nov. 8 launch aboard Columbia is yet one more risk, one he readily accepts for love of space.

Space is his calling for better and worse.

Better is exploring the final frontier, whether on the ground as a Mission Control capsule communicator or in orbit as the chief repairman for the Hubble space telescope.

Worse - no, worst - is being hurled into orbit by more than a half-million gallons of explosive fuel and two giant firecrackers.

Fly alongside Musgrave and this is what you’d hear once the booster rockets light: “I’m just scared to death, man. I hope this thing holds together.”

This, as the other crew members “hoot and holler and carry on like it’s a party.”

“Probably they’re more appropriate than I am,” he says quietly, gently. “They’re doing the only thing that you can do when you’re in that situation.”

Only one person in the world has been in “that situation” six times, at least until Musgrave soars: moonwalker John Young, who flew twice during Gemini, twice during Apollo and twice on space shuttle Columbia. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration still considers Young an active astronaut at age 66 even though he’s in management and never will fly in space again.

Ex-astronaut Vance Brand was 59 the last time he flew in space in 1990 and set the space age record.

Breaking the age barrier doesn’t mean much to Musgrave, a surgeon as well as an unpublished poet with six academic degrees (he’s working on master’s theses for two more in psychology and history).

Nor does tying the record for the most spaceflights. Or becoming the first person to fly six times in space shuttles. Or becoming the first person to fly in all five space shuttles: Challenger in 1983 and 1985, Discovery in 1989, Atlantis in 1991, Endeavour in 1993 and, soon, Columbia.

“I feel very privileged to be in my 60s and to be going into space,” says Musgrave, a healthy and indefatigable 5-foot-10-inch, 152-pound man who runs to stay in shape. “But the important thing is I’ve been able to be on the job and to be able to live my calling for 30 years.”

Dr. F. Story Musgrave (F. for Franklin) was working during the mid-1960s at the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center in Lexington when he got the calling.

It was, he says, an epiphany.

NASA was starting to hire scientists, not just test pilots, as astronauts. Musgrave signed on in 1967. His colleagues flew to the moon the following year and landed the year after that. Musgrave, thinking Mars was not too far off, waited patiently for his crack at the moon, but it was not to be. Neither was Mars.

The Apollo program ended after six manned lunar landings. Then came Skylab, then Apollo-Soyuz. Still Musgrave waited. He’d joined NASA as “a longtime investor and that was for better or for worse.”

“Whether I flew or didn’t fly or flew once or flew 10 times, that was not the issue,” he says. “The issue was I had found my calling.”

Musgrave finally made it into orbit in 1983 - 16 long years after NASA had chosen him as an astronaut - and performed the first spacewalk of the shuttle era.

Four more shuttle flights followed over the next decade, including the one that made him famous: the Hubble space telescope repair. He was the lead spacewalker on that hugely successful mission three years ago; the mechanics came naturally for this Massachusetts farm boy who had kept his family’s tractor running a half-century earlier.

Soon, everyone seemed to know - and wanted to know better - this amiable, soft-spoken, completely bald astronaut who had helped save Hubble and who openly shared his fears and belief in intelligent extra-terrestrial life.

He’d be in Manhattan and someone would walk up and say, “Story?” He even attracted the attention of the woman who was pestering David Letterman; she posed as a reporter and kept calling Musgrave at his office until NASA security intervened.

Musgrave embraces it all. It is, after all, his calling.

“One thing that has been missing is the heart and the soul” of the space program, he says. “I do not think that we have given to people what the inner experience is, what is going on in the heart, in the head, what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. … That’s what human spaceflight is about.”

His upcoming flight, a 16-day science mission, won’t be nearly as dazzling as his last. Although two spacewalks are planned, Musgrave will stay inside as two younger astronauts go out to practice station-building techniques and will monitor a crystal-growing satellite.

For his four crewmates, in their 30s and 40s, he’s a mission highlight.

“Story makes the flight extra special,” says commander Kenneth Cockrell, at 46 the next-oldest on the crew.

The average age of a NASA astronaut is just under 42, according to space agency statistics, and the average length of an astronaut’s career is 11 years.

Although NASA has no official age limit for its 102 astronauts, medical exams are required. The Russian Space Agency, on the other hand, has an age cutoff at about 50 for its cosmonauts, although that rule sometimes is bent.

Commercial airline pilots, in comparison, must retire at age 60.

To be fair, Musgrave will not fly the shuttle. He will be a passenger. Still, every crew member has a vital role, especially if there’s trouble.

On the Hubble mission, Musgrave performed three grueling spacewalks in five days after months of 16-hour workdays. He was 58 at the time.

Three years later, he’s still working 16-hour days to prepare for space.

But for how long?

“Nobody’s going to kick you out of the office just because you get old,” says his spacewalking partner on the Hubble mission, Jeffrey Hoffman, 51. “On the other hand, I don’t think anybody’s going to retire at 75 as an active astronaut. Sooner or later, we all have to do something else. Even Story.”