Last Updated: May 26, 1999
Printer-friendly version
Wednesday luncheon
Lucid’s homey style is a breath of fresh air
U.S. astronaut with record in space may have spent
six months on board the Mir space station, but her feet never left the
ground
By Mike Pride
Heads of state and name politicians, famous thinkers and authors, the
giants of our industry — it’s easy to get spoiled by the speakers at an
ASNE convention. Then someone like Shannon Lucid comes along, and your
first impression sitting in the audience is to look at your watch and think,
"Oh, brother!"
But, out of politeness, you listen, and before long you’re changing
your mind. Something interesting is happening here after all.
Then she’s got you: that middle-American genuineness, the slow dawning
of what this woman has done with her life, the fascination with how NASA
ever found a person so smart, brave, durable, steady, patient, unflappable
and positive: the perfect astronaut. Shakespeare couldn’t have invented
a better name for this character than Shannon Lucid. Part of the charm
of listening to a space traveler is that even after all these years, not
to mention all those Steven Spielberg movies, space is a great unknown.
Part of the charm of Shannon Lucid is that she spent so long in space
and her feet never left the ground.
One day during her six months aboard Mir, the Russian space station,
Lucid watched her spacemates Yuri and Yuri, work outside on a maintenance
project. "The future is happening right now," she thought. And yet, typically,
her worries remained down-to-earth and in the present. One scary moment
she looked out at one of the Yuris and thought: "Oh my goodness, I hope
he knows what he’s doing." We earthlings could relate to that; we’ve all
had similar thoughts — about our auto mechanics.
Imagine looking down at Cape Kennedy on one orbit and seeing on the
launch pad the shuttle that is coming to take you home. Then, on the next
pass, you look down and it is gone, wheeled away because of the threat
of a hurricane.
Shannon Lucid remained steadfast throughout such trials and matter-of-fact
in talking about them. "One evening after dinner," she began one anecdote,
"Yuri and Yuri and I were sort of floating around the table. ..."
When a shuttle visited Mir to drop off a change of clothes, groceries
and other necessities, it was the fresh tomatoes and onions that made her
day.
Her kids laugh at her because she always has a different book going
in every room of her home on earth, and she was a reader in space, too.
Beneath the contentment of being above the world’s troubles for 188
days, four hours, no minutes and 14 seconds — "I had a good time every
day I was up there," Lucid said — lay the improbability of it all. She
spoke of growing up in Oklahoma and knowing that if the enemy — the Russians
— attacked, surely they would save The Big One for Oklahoma, center of
the universe. Fear of nuclear war, she said, had been "the prominent shadowing"
of her childhood.
The same was true for her cosmonaut pals aboard Mir, which, in Russian,
means both world and peace. Yuri and Yuri had grown up thinking America
was the evil empire, a threat to their existence.
As children, Lucid said, "not one of us would ever have guessed this
would happen."
From the ASNE audience, the inevitable question was: How did you survive
up there without a daily newspaper?
Lucid told of NASA piping her English-language news broadcasts and of
receiving weekly summaries from a NASA colleague, although this news came
with a catch: "I had to take all the news through his political filter,
and he thought it was a good time to convert me."
But if she is typical of future space station types, editors concerned
about the circulation challenge on the Final Frontier can focus on delivery
without fretting too much about demand. "I liked knowing what was going
on on Earth," Lucid said.
Pride is editor of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor.
