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It's become an American cliche, the familiar answer to a question asked of American schoolkids everywhere in the 1960s and '70s. What do you want to be when you grow up? the teacher would ask. The less inspired among us would recite the usual answers: firefighters, doctors, police officers. But there were always other children whose imaginations were less bridled. Those were the kids whose thoughts reached for the stars - the kids who wiped their Tang mustaches on their sleeves and answered, I want to be an astronaut.

The vast majority of boys and girls who gazed up into starry night skies with visions of space exploration in their heads have grown up and settled for a more down-to-earth occupation. But others pursued the dream and really did become astronauts. Three UMR graduates - Thomas D. Akers, AMth'73, MS AMth'75, Janet Kavandi, MS Chem'82, and Sandra Magnus, Phys'86, MS EE'90 - are among that elite group. Growing up during the heyday of the U.S. space program, they watched from below with the rest of us while pioneering "right stuff" astronauts accomplished astonishing feats. Their heroes - now household names like Alan Shepard, Chuck Yeager, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and Shannon Lucid - were larger-than-life characters who orbited Earth, walked on the moon, lived in space, broke down barriers, and inspired an entire generation of dreamers.

Today, Akers, Kavandi and Magnus are helping to usher in a new era in space exploration, one that could turn the stuff of science fiction into reality - much as the pioneering astronauts did in their era. While NASA's chief goal is to complete work on the $60 billion international space station, a job that is scheduled for completion in 2006, the work of today's astronauts could lead to even greater achievements: inhabiting Mars, routine commercial flights into space, perhaps even the discovery of intelligent life on other planets. Akers, Kavandi and Magnus have all played a part in the construction of the space station, and are part of a bridge between NASA's storied space race past, fueled by the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the more cooperative present, in which American astronauts work with Russian cosmonauts to build the international space station.

Akers, the first UMR graduate to enter the astronaut corps, joined NASA in 1987. It was an auspicious juncture in the program's history - just one year after the Challenger disaster claimed the lives of seven astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. Kavandi entered the program in 1995 and Magnus in 1996. Both Kavandi and Akers, who is now retired from NASA, are veterans of space flight. This summer, Magnus is scheduled to leave Earth's orbit for the first time.

Akers, who now teaches in UMR's mathematics and statistics department, can be counted among NASA's legends. He once held the American record for logging the most time walking in space, and the press has described him in heroic terms, as "the prototype of the modern astronaut, the Chuck Yeager of the new ziggurat." Kavandi, too, is gaining recognition for her time in space. She has embarked on three shuttle missions; the most recent was last summer's voyage on the shuttle Atlantis to install a new passageway for the international space station. And while Magnus has yet to fly into space, she was instrumental in getting the space station off the ground. Once she completes her forthcoming mission on STS-112, which will deliver equipment to help spacewalkers move around the space station's exterior, she too will enter the fraternity of space explorers.

 

NO LIGHT BULB WENT OFF

For Sandra Magnus, the idea of becoming an astronaut crystallized while she was in junior high school. "It's not like I saw a film or anything to make me want to become an astronaut," she says. "No light bulb went off. It's just something I latched on to. The whole idea of exploring and being on the edge, that whole sense of adventure, it just appealed to me."

But even in the mid-1970s, just a few years after NASA astronauts first landed on the moon, the idea that a girl could grow up to become an astronaut was little more than a pipe dream. In 1978, however, something happened that made Magnus' dream suddenly more of a possibility. "I can clearly remember in 1978, when I was in high school, there was a newspaper article about the first women who were admitted into the astronaut corps," she recalls. "I remember reading that and being really happy." One of those women was Shannon Lucid, who lived in space for a record 188 days back in 1996. Until recently, Lucid and Magnus, very much the astronaut she dreamed of becoming, shared an office in NASA's Johnson Space Center. Lucid is now NASA's chief scientist.

"She's just a spectacular person," Magnus says of her mentor. "She comes from a generation that had to knock down a lot of walls" to make it into NASA's elite cadre of astronauts. "She made it easier for my generation. Hopefully, I'll be able to make it easier for the next."

Prior to her current assignment, Magnus was a "capcom," or capsule communicator, in Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center. The term is a holdover from NASA's early days, when staffers in Houston actually did communicate with capsules - the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space capsules. Today, Magnus explains, "Capcom is the voice of the control center" to the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the space station.

Prior to her capcom assignment, Magnus spent a lot of time from 1998 through 2000 shuttling between Houston and Russia's Star City outside of Moscow, where she helped Russian cosmonauts prepare for their trips to the space station.

Magnus came to UMR from her hometown of Belleville, Ill. She describes her studies at UMR as broadening, introducing her to engineering and a host of other disciplines. "The physics curriculum was very open to the things that interested me," she says. In addition to studying Russian, she also took courses in German, computer science and electrical engineering. After earning her bachelor's degree in physics - "a spectacular foundation" for her future at NASA - Magnus joined McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Co. in St. Louis as an engineer. She worked on stealth technology by day, studying the effectiveness of radar signature reduction techniques, and went to graduate school at night, pursuing her M.S. in electrical engineering through UMR's Engineering Education Center in St. Louis. All the while, she kept alive her dreams of joining NASA, then gaining knowledge and experience that would benefit her next career. After earning her master's degree in 1990, she went on for her doctorate from Georgia Tech, then landed her dream job with NASA.

Although the public still thinks an astronaut's job consists solely of riding a shuttle into space and tinkering on the space station, Magnus stresses that it involves much more. "It's a combination of training, systems integration, the technical job, and dealing with the public," she says.

Still, the allure of space flight is undeniable. Magnus is looking forward to her first shuttle mission, but is already thinking about her next goal: living in space for an extended period, as Lucid did in 1996.

When asked why the public should continue to support the space program, many astronauts point to the tangible benefits that have come about as a result of space exploration - technology that gave us heart defibrillators, portable medical equipment, ultraviolet coating for sunglasses, microwave ovens and lightweight materials. But Magnus, ever the explorer, points to other aspects. "Philosophically, I think the space program represents our desire to explore as a species. I've felt a need to be a part of that exploration."

 

MOONSTUCK

Janet Sellers (now Kavandi) was 10 years old and visiting her grandmother in tiny Cassville, Mo., when she watched Neil Armstrong take those famous first steps onto the moon. "I remember thinking it was one of the most momentous events in world history," she says. "I remember thinking it would be interesting to fly to the moon and look back to Earth to see what it looked like."

Three decades later, the image of Earth as a blue marble suspended in black space - an image first captured and transmitted by the Apollo 11 moonwalkers - is a familiar one. But Kavandi still would like to see it for herself, from the same perspective as Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. "I would love to walk on the moon,"she says. "That would probably be my ultimate goal...I haven't given up hope. I think someday we will go back to the moon."

Kavandi completed her third flight into space last July. It was a 13-day, 5 million-mile journey to the space station to install a new air lock on the station. Kavandi was at the controls of the shuttle Atlantis' robot arm, which maneuvered spacewalkers James Reilly II and Michael Gernhardt as they installed the new passageway. She also was in charge of transferring supplies and equipment within the shuttle. "The transfer was a lot like moving day at your house," she says. "You had to make sure everything was boxed in the right box and labeled properly."

That allows staffers to transfer items in such a way that "you'd know where to find it whenever you got to your new place."

Like Magnus, Kavandi became interested in space exploration at an early age. "It was at the elementary school level" when space first captured her attention.

As a girl, she and her father would sit on the front porch of their Cassville home to stargaze and talk about space. "My father put into our minds that we could be whatever we wanted to be, regardless of gender," she says. Also influential was an uncle who worked for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. There, Kavandi got her first glimpse of the space agency's inner workings and met test pilots. Back in the classroom, astronomy and space exploration were never far from her mind. "Any time that we had a choice of subjects to write about, I would choose either space or archaeology," she says.

Space exploration proved to be the more attractive subject. But it would be several years later before she made a career of it. At Carthage (Mo.) High School, "I had a very good chemistry teacher who encouraged me to pursue chemistry." After graduating with honors in 1977, she enrolled in Missouri Southern State College in nearby Joplin, Mo., where she earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry. She then headed to UMR to pursue her master's degree in chemistry. Following graduation from UMR in 1982, she returned to Joplin, joining Eagle-Picher Industries as an engineer in new battery development for defense applications. In 1984, she went to work for Boeing in Seattle, continuing work in the energy storage area. She continued her education, getting a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Washington-Seattle in 1990. For her doctoral dissertation, she used a pressure-indicating coating to test the aerodynamic properties of models in wind tunnels. The work led to two patents and a host of technical papers and presentations.

Despite her success in academia and with Boeing, Kavandi's heart was set on going into space. "The more I learned about the jobs at NASA and how the training encompassed so many interesting and varied fields, the more I wanted to be an astronaut," she says. She was among the 122 applicants selected for the astronaut corps in December 1994 and reported to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston the following March. Her first shuttle assignment, in June 1998, was aboard the shuttle Discovery. The flight was a historic one, the ninth and final docking mission with the Russian space station Mir. That flight concluded the joint Russian/U.S. Phase 1 space station program. (While Kavandi was aboard Discovery, Magnus was helping to coordinate the Phase 1 program from Earth, shuttling between Moscow and Houston.) Between flights, Kavandi has served as a capcom in Houston's Mission Control and in NASA's robotics branch - where she trained on maneuvering the robotic arm for last summer's Atlantis mission.

Like all astronauts, Kavandi also devotes her time to telling the public about the space program. She's a frequent visitor to UMR, where she has spoken to participants in the 2000 Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) Conference, a university outreach to get middle school-age girls more interested in science, and UMR's summer Aerospace Camp (see story on page 11), which she visited virtually by teleconference during the camp's first session, in 1998. Magnus, too, has been involved in the EYH Conference - she was the keynote speaker for the 2001 meeting - and also has participated in the UMR Honors Academy. Kavandi, Magnus and Akers all have logged countless hours speaking to schools and civic groups, all in the name of promoting NASA's mission.

Being an astronaut has lost some of its luster, now that there are so many of them. The club of space travelers is not as exclusive as it once was, as a USA Today article - "Quick: Name an astronaut" - noted last May.

That fact is not lost on Kavandi, who thinks the media has largely lost interest in NASA missions - unless disaster strikes. "We feel that if we're not in the news, we're doing things right," she says. "A lot of kids don't see (shuttle missions) on TV like we did when we were kids. It's certainly not as publicized as it used to be, when we were going to the moon."

Still, Kavandi and her NASA colleagues work hard to get the word out to schools, in hopes of capturing the imagination of a future space explorer. One way she does that is by showing a video that depicts the challenges of even the most mundane activities - eating, for instance - in zero gravity. Once kids see astronauts trying to catch peas floating in mid-air, they're hooked. "By the end of a presentation they're very interested. They all want to be astronauts then."

 

BACK TO SCHOOL

Growing up in Eminence, Mo., in the 1960s, Tom Akers wasn't one of those youngsters who dreamed of launching into outer space. He had his mind set on being a teacher. The route was circuitous - he started out as a high school principal, then became an Air Force test pilot, then a shuttle astronaut - but Akers eventually landed in the classroom. Today, he teaches in UMR's mathematics and statistics department, where he puts his NASA and Air Force experiences to good use in the form of practical problems for calculus classes. When Akers asks students to calculate the angle of flight of an F-4 flying at 40,000 feet, 60 miles away from its landing target, he is not just another math professor at the chalkboard. He's someone who has had to figure out that trigonometry problem on the fly. "Especially in the Calc 3 classes, where it's three-dimensional calculus, I have a lot of real-world examples I can show students," Akers says.

When he enrolled at UMR in 1969 to study mathematics, Akers was planning on pursuing a teaching career at the community college level. But after earning his bachelor's and master's degrees, he returned to his hometown of Eminence, along the Ozark National Scenic Riverways southeast of Rolla, where the public school superintendent "ended up talking me into becoming his high school principal." Akers pursued that job for four years. Then one day, an Air Force recruiter dropped off some literature, and piqued Akers' interest. At age 28, he joined the Air Force.

Akers was no stranger to the Air Force life. His wife, Kaye, is the daughter of a career Air Force officer, so she knew what they were getting into. His first assignment after officer training school was to Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., where he was an air-to-air missile data analyst. There, he caught the bug to fly. "I got a ride in the back of an F-4 one weekend and absolutely fell in love with it." The Air Force selected him for test pilot school in 1982. After a year of training, he was reassigned to Eglin as a test flight engineer and worked on a variety of weapons development programs, flying backseat in F-4s, F-15s, T-38s and other aircraft.

It didn't take long for Akers to want to fly higher.

While at test-pilot school, he saw the walls covered with photographs of former Air Force pilots who went on to greater glory as astronauts, and he decided to follow the same trajectory. He applied for the astronaut program in 1985 and was interviewed but not selected. He applied again in 1987, and this time made the cut.

 

Akers capturing a wayward Intelsat. NASA photo

All four of Akers' shuttle missions were historic. The first, in October 1990, sent the Ulysses spacecraft on its four-year journey to investigate the polar regions of the Sun by way of Jupiter. His second mission, the maiden voyage of Endeavour in May 1992, had him and two crew members conducting the first three-person spacewalk in NASA's history ­ all to capture and repair the wayward Intelsat (International Telecommunications Satellite). In December 1993, Akers was again floating in space, this time to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. His fourth and final shuttle mission, in September 1996, was a rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir, and to return Shannon Lucid to Earth after her record six-month stay in space.

Akers has gained his fair share of acclaim for space exploration. An article in the February 2001 issue of Playboy portrayed him as one of the heirs to the early astronauts, those "single-combat knights of the sixties' rocket-jock corps," as the article described them. But Akers is quick to brush aside comparisons to Chuck Yeager and company. His favorite astronaut, in fact, is John Young, a former Navy test pilot who joined NASA in 1960 and flew aboard the first space shuttle mission in 1981. Now an associate director at NASA and a technical advisor to shuttle missions, Young is very much the team player that to Akers personifies the NASA organization.

"To me, he is the ultimate astronaut," Akers says. "I admire him because he's still right there at NASA, unlike others who went on to capitalize on their fame."

When Akers delivered the address at UMR's winter 1992 commencement ceremony, he let graduates in on a little NASA secret: while spacewalkers and shuttle crews grab all the headlines, it takes a cast of thousands to ensure a single space mission's success. Six months removed from his mission to rescue the Intelsat, Akers described that effort as "not only... an example of the power of teamwork, it also illustrates how many times a few people get all the credit for a team effort."

"You'll experience this someday," he told the new grads, "but good team players don't sweat it. Indeed, an important element of being a team player is the ability to be content with your team's success and not require personal recognition. Of course a good team leader will make sure every contributor on the team gets recognized."

Today when asked about his NASA experiences, Akers stays on message. "NASA is the epitome of teamwork," he says. "We astronauts get all the attention from every shuttle mission, but there are thousands of engineers, scientists, janitors, secretaries - all doing their part. Everybody has to do their part to make it successful."

One decade as an astronaut was plenty for Akers. Today, he's living his own down-to-earth dream: teaching at his alma mater and planning his eventual retirement to a 12-acre homestead in Eminence. "I retired from NASA to come back here and have a life," he says. "I'm doing what I've always wanted to do."

On campus, Akers tries to keep a low profile. He doesn't talk much about his space days. Often, students in his class don't even know their instructor is a former astronaut. "Sometimes it's a month or two into the semester when someone says, 'I didn't know you were an astronaut,' and I say, 'Well, I used to be,' and leave it at that."

Akers still performs many of the public relations functions on behalf of UMR. Every fall, he appears at the St. Louis Engineers Club's Rolla Night to speak to prospective UMR students, and he works with UMR's Aerospace Camp program in the summer. "The space camp kids - you have a captive audience with them. They're all interested in space and they're very knowledgeable. Whenever I talk to a group of kids, I always get a question that teaches me something." But the instruction is mutual. When describing an astronaut's job to Aerospace Camp kids, Akers offers them a glimpse into the less glamorous aspects of shuttle missions. "Everyone thinks that the only thing astronauts do is go into space," he says. "I only went four times in 10 years. I spent a lot of time training, a lot of time on technical assignments."

In his hour-long presentations to schools and civic groups, Akers describes some of the lesser-known duties of an astronaut: cleanup duty in space, talking to the media, and making presentations to the public. "I tell them every job has things that aren't always fun."

But when the time comes for Akers to begin his slide show of images from his four shuttle missions, kids' eyes light up as the house lights go down. "The minute you start showing pictures, it gets quiet," he says. "They're enthralled."

At that moment, cleaning toilets in zero gravity seems a small price to pay for a shot at adventure. At that moment, everyone in the audience imagines living the dream - of being an astronaut.