Determination

By Charles Sowell  

JULY 14, 2011 10:07 a.m. (0)

Ron McNair, who was killed in the Challenger disaster in 1986, talked Charles Bolden into applying for the space shuttle program just a few years before the Lake City native died.

The irony of two black men with roots sunk deep in the segregated past of South Carolina talking about being astronauts was not lost on either man at the time. But Bolden said the challenges of growing up in Columbia in the 1950s and 1960s actually helped put him on a path that led to the stars.

“Ron shamed me into it, actually. He told me you’ll never know if you don’t try,” said Bolden, who was named to the top job at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration by President Obama in 2009 after a successful career as a Marine aviator, space shuttle pilot and commander.

For a small state, South Carolina has strong connections to the manned space program and the shuttle in particular.

McNair left the tobacco fields of the Lowcountry to earn a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a mission specialist on his final flight that also claimed the lives of Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Judith Resnik, and Ellison Onizuka.

Bolden is from Columbia, raised in a house his brother still lives in.

He said overseeing the end of the shuttle program is hard.

“I commanded the Atlantis flight in 1992,” he said. “Watching it go up for the last time was especially poignant for me.”

The final flight of Atlantis ends on July 21 and marks the last chapter of the space shuttle era after 135 missions.

Six astronauts have South Carolina connections. Catherine Coleman is the only woman. She was born in Charleston and is a veteran of two space missions aboard the shuttle. She was the lead mission specialist for the deployment of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Charlie Duke was the 10th man to walk on the moon on the Apollo 16 mission and is a graduate of Lancaster High School.

He loves to tell the story of how command module pilot Ken Mattingly had misplaced his wedding ring while Duke and John Young explored the surface of the moon.

After their return to the command module, Duke was acting as safety officer for a spacewalk by Mattingly. While observing from the airlock, he noticed Mattingly’s wedding ring floating by.

Duke grabbed for it, but missed, and it floated out into space. “When you think about the physics of a round ring striking a round helmet, the odds are incredible that this would happen, but it hit the back of Mattingly’s helmet and floated straight back to me in the airlock.”

He gave the ring to an amazed Mattingly after the space walk was finished.

The other astronauts with state connections are Frank Culbertson, from Charleston, who flew three shuttle missions; John Casper, who was born in Greenville, attended Purdue and is now the assistant manager of the shuttle program, and Randy Bresnik, who in 2009 became the first Citadel graduate to fly in space.

Over the space shuttle’s history, experiments by South Carolina researchers have been given the grand treatment by NASA. There were 30 programs run by the University of South Carolina and 35 by Clemson University. Even tiny Claflin University got in on the act with four of its projects sent into orbit.

Mike Yost was a graduate student at USC when he worked on a project that sent cardiac cells into orbit to study the effects of low gravity on growing new heart cells.

“We’d gotten cells that looked more like scrambled eggs than cylindrical cardiac cells in all of our previous work,” said Yost, a professor and researcher at the USC School of Medicine.

“When we sent our samples up on the shuttle, we were able to grow good cells, and more than that we were able to get them to grow several layers thick,” he said. “That had never happened before and it changed the way we approached the research at several institutions.”

Today, using the lessons learned from the space shuttle experiments, researchers can grow perfectly good cardiac cells in earth’s gravity, Yost said.

“But we might never have been able to do that if it weren’t for the lessons and insights we got from hitching a ride on the shuttle.”

If watching the last shuttle launch was a poignant moment for Bolden, it was a revelation for Allison Marsh, an assistant professor at USC specializing in public history with interests in the history of technology and the history of tourism.

“In my area of history we don’t really deal with the nuts and bolts of a thing like the space program,” she said. “I deal with public history, the things that make an event significant to the people of a particular time.”

Marsh said people watching on TV actually got a far better view of the shuttle launch.

“We were about eight miles away from the launch pad,” she said. “And a line of trees blocked the sight of the shuttle and gantry, so we couldn’t see the ignition and actual liftoff.”

But what Marsh did get was the impressions of the crowd, which didn’t come through to the TV viewers.

“There were people from all over the world there that day and there was such an overwhelming feeling of excitement about seeing the last launch and sorrow because it was the last launch,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing I wish I could convey to my students… that sense of wonder, or importance.”

Marsh is very much a child of the shuttle program era and some of her earliest memories are of watching the shuttle on TV.

“This was so much better because of the tremendous feeling of kinship among the people who made the trip to Florida,” she said.

South Carolina’s kinship with the space program goes deeper than just astronauts and science experiments. The textile mill in Slater had a role in producing the fabric used for the Apollo 11 spacesuits worn by the men who walked on the moon.

Every shuttle, including Atlantis on the last mission, landed on Michelin tires produced by Michelin North America, which is headquartered in Greenville. Michelin makes the tires at its plant in Norwood, N.C., near Charlotte.

Bolden said the space program will continue without the shuttles, and he’s confident there will be an eventual return to manned space flight.

But the budget in the coming years is thin in the kind of funding that makes manned flight possible.

“We’ll do the best with what we’re given,” he said. “I can see a day when we walk on the moon again, or on Mars.”

Bolden’s is the same kind of spirit that John Kennedy had, the kind of spirit that took Ron McNair from the tobacco fields of Lake City to MIT and on into earth orbit.

“I made up my mind, at age 7, that I was going to the Naval Academy,” he said. “My parents, who were both educators, set high standards and helped me live up to them.

“I never wanted to be a Marine (he is a retired Marine general) and I never thought I’d be an astronaut, but I was.”

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