Today's astronauts a different breed

Rigorous training for astronauts remains a NASA trademark. Above, astronaut Buzz Aldrin of the Apollo 11 lunar mission undergoes zero-gravity training in July, 1969. Below, Columbia crew member Michel Tognini simulates emergency egress procedures in June, 1998.

INTERACTIVE Suit Up

July 13, 1999
Web posted at: 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT)

By Robin Lloyd
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) - Today's "right stuff" may look foreign to the astronauts of yesteryear, but the commitment remains the same: months and months of mind-numbing, body-punishing training.

During the early Apollo years, the training was a bit more primitive and spontaneous, says Gene Cernan, the Apollo 17 astronaut who is the last person to have walked on the moon. He calls that distinction "dubious," because he had hoped someone else would have returned there by now.

"There was a massive, massive amount of training," Cernan says. "I'm not going to say it was super formalized. A lot of times we would say, 'We've got four hours. Hey, let's spend it at the simulator.'"

Simulators are mock cockpits with all the switches, valves and computer and window displays of a particular spacecraft in flight.

Nowadays, astronauts spend even more time with simulators, because the hardware and software has been perfected over the years to match the routines and quirks of the only U.S. spacecraft fleet now used for human space flight -- the space shuttle.

But the autonomy suggested by Cernan's comment is no longer typical of astronaut training.

Instead, every astronaut's 10-month pre-flight training is overseen by a phalanx of up to 350 trainers and codified in a nearly 3-inch-thick book that defines every single lesson that astronauts must master to fly the shuttle.

Lessons address such topics as ascent, atmospheric entry, robotics, extra-vehicular activity (space walking), crew systems and rendezvous.

Cernan says the result is that the job of the astronaut has become "blue collar."

"We used to go down (to Cape Canaveral) six months before the flight," he says. "Now, they don't even go down there until a day before the flight."

Risks differ in the shuttle era

There may be some truth to Cernan's lament, says shuttle astronaut Ken Cockrell, if you think that being an airplane pilot is blue-collar work.

"We're the laborers," he says. "But it's also above white collar at times, and that is the coordination of making it all go together."

When things go wrong, shuttle crew members quickly morph from tool wielders to management.

"The last flight I was on, the hatch wouldn't open. I was the commander of that flight. I was treated like any manager on the ground. I was asked my ideas by top-level NASA managers," Cockrell says.

The stakes differ too nowadays, Cockrell says. The Apollo landings were a one-shot deal. If you missed your landing target on the moon, that was it. But those astronauts also could wave off a lunar landing, something the shuttle crew cannot do when it lands at Cape Canaveral.

"If we don't do it correctly, we lose the vehicle and ourselves," Cockrell said.

Cockrell said the job he and his crew is rehearsing -- a space station assembly mission next year -- is "as complex as the moon landing."

Astronauts assembling the space station must lift large module pieces out of the shuttle payload bay and fit them into the existing station modules using a robotic arm. The task requires skills considerably different from the piloting prowess of Neil Armstrong.

"We have a 31,000 module about 30 feet long, 14 feet in diameter, and we have to have it within 2 degrees of wobble to being perfectly lined up or it won't work," Cockrell says of his team's upcoming task.

No auto-pilot for Apollo training

Jim Lovell, who flew on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13, said his crew was trained on simulators but also spent many hours with engineers building the spacecraft, learning how they operated and helping in their design.

"The training in those days was rather ad hoc because the people running NASA were basically engineers," Lovell said. "They didn't really know how to train astronauts to some degree.

"A lot of stuff, we had to learn ourselves. Training became some school work in those areas we were not familiar with, like orbital mechanics, the extensive gyroscopic systems for control of the vehicle."

Training had to be more inventive in the Apollo years because astronauts were flying largely untested spacecraft. By comparison, the shuttle fleet has logged nearly 100 flights.

By now, trainers and even many astronauts know both its typical and obscure malfunctions and how to negotiate them.

In Apollo days, it was just the opposite, Ray Dell'Osso says. He's in charge of training astronauts for all activities involving robotics and space walking and has been training astronauts since 1966. He's seen the crop of astronauts grow from 15 to 130.

"The Apollo spacecraft was used only by a particular crew," he said. "Those astronauts wanted to participate in a lot of tests at the Cape while they were doing training at the Cape."

Astronauts spend just as many hours training these days, Dell'Osso says, although now it takes place at NASA's Johnson Space Center, not Cape Canaveral.

The training concept has remained the same from Apollo through Skylab to the space shuttle and the space station, he says. But the equipment has grown larger and more sophisticated.

Astronauts now train underwater for space walks in a 220-foot-long swimming pool called the neutral buoyancy lab, 10 times larger than its earliest predecessor.

As many as 55 people trainers are in the pool during a procedure rehearsal, which can run for five to six hours.

A day or so before launch, the crew will go to Cape Canaveral where they suit up and rehearse getting into and out of the shuttle cabin.

From space cowboys to technology masters

Training aside, today's astronauts are a different breed.

Apollo astronauts, especially in the early years, often had a swagger to their step by virtue of their pre-space exploits as test pilots.

"Back in those days, going to the moon, geology was important," Lovell says. "But how do we train pilots to be geologists? We concentrated on observing, not the analytical parts of the rocks."

Many of today's astronauts have never flown before entering the program.

Instead, they are selected for their academic and engineering know-how, and the astronaut corps has been divided into pilots and "mission specialists." The latter group is not expected to fly the shuttle other than in an emergency.

Yet today's astronauts have spent an extraordinary number of hours in space compared to the Apollo spacemen. For instance, shuttle astronaut Ken Cockrell has logged more than 906 hours, spanning 38 days.

NASA selected the first astronaut class in 1959. From 500 candidates with the required flight and engineering experience and height requirement -- under 5 feet 11 inches -- seven military men became astronauts. By 1964, the emphasis was placed on academic qualifications.

The first class with women astronauts was admitted in 1978. In total, some 300 U.S. astronauts have been selected in NASA's history.

Dell'Osso says he intends to stay in the astronaut training business for many years ahead.

His biggest challenge today is the International Space Station. How do you train astronauts for a floating laboratory that is not yet built? Simulators for new spacecraft always have a few bugs at the start. But the space station modules are constantly redesigned.

Dell'Osso helped to train Alan Shepard, the first American in space, as well as Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins of the Apollo 11 crew and hundreds of others over the years.

"At the time you don't think much of it," Dell'Osso says. "Now, you think, 'Jeez it was kind of neat to be working with those guys.'"