A young Terry J. Hart straps his floating body into a seat among dozens of notebooks, computer screens and buttons. His mission, using a remote robot arm, is to lure a satellite that had been spinning out of control into a bay of the Challenger space shuttle.
When Hart captures the satellite, the Walter Cronkite-narrated film cuts to Houston’s mission control team standing up in applause. On Thursday, about 270 students in the gymnasium of St. Anne School in Bethlehem followed suit.
Sitting in the front row, 5-year-old Isabelle Troxell wanted to know how the man before her, now in his 70s and dressed in mere street clothes, got to do such a thing.
“When I was your age,” the former NASA astronaut told her, “I wasn’t thinking about it because no one really knew what an astronaut was.”
Students at St. Anne certainly do. In the hallways and classrooms, they’ve hung paper astronaut helmets with their pictures in them and rocket posters with inspirational messages; in their curricula, teachers have incorporated astronomy lessons, all in keeping with this year’s school-wide outer space theme.
It was a happy coincidence that this year was also the 50th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, advancement director Eileen Brida said.
Thursday afternoon she shuttled Hart past a homemade cardboard rocket decorated with the students’ handprints, through the space-themed hallway and into a gym where students from kindergarten through eighth grade streamed in.
Hart left his nearly 400-pound space suit in a closet at home. After 35 years, he said, “It drives my wife crazy that I can still get into it.”
Originally from Pittsburgh, Hart said he applied to NASA on a whim.After active duty in the Air Force and degrees from Lehigh University, MIT and Rutgers, he was working at Bell Telephone Laboratories and flying with the New Jersey Air National Guard when he saw an ad NASA had placed in a National Guard magazine. Applying with about 8,000 others, Hart later told NASA he was “floored” to be invited to join the 1978 Shuttle class.
Hart’s Challenger mission, STS 41-C, launched from the Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 1984, lasting 10 days. His pilot, Francis Richard Scobee, was one of the seven crew members killed aboard the Challenger during its tragic failed launch of the STS-51-L mission on January 28, 1986.
“That was a bad day,” he said in an interview as students filed into the gym for his presentation.
Turning his brightened attention to them, Hart was greeted with a standing ovation.
“I’ve never seen such a warm welcome,” Hart told them. He didn’t mention the Challenger disaster to the children.
A professor at Lehigh University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1968, Hart lives in Hellertown and says he’s spoken at most of the elementary and middle schools in the Lehigh Valley.
His presentation, which chronicled 100 years of flight, opened with a question:
“How many of you want to go to Mars?”
At least half the hands in the room popped up. Hart explained it would be a three-year mission which, as the students would later find out, would entail eating dehydrated food, urinating into a tube and feeling blood float up to your head in zero-gravity.
“Do you still want to go?” he asked to a cacophony of yeses.
Some squirmed as Hart zipped through slides of the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, the first commercial jet and the Space Race. But a few points snapped them to attention: a picture of Ham the monkey, the United States’ first astronaut; videos of rockets ascending through the atmosphere; and an image from space of the Northern Lights over Moscow.
He did what he could to make complicated space terminology palatable, comparing the Solar Maximum Satellite that he corralled on the shuttle to the size of a school bus and describing the Small Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy as a nursery of baby stars.
For the teachers, he noted the astronauts’ consensus of the most beautiful place on Earth from space is the Bahamas.
The kids wanted to know the distances from Earth to various planets, as well as what he ate and how he went to the bathroom.
“They trained us to hold it for a week,” Hart joked.
Inspiring the students, Hart talked about the frontier of space and how so much of it remains unexplored.
Asteroids, for example, are the apple of scientists’ eyes right now, he said, untouched for all the universe’s 5 billion years.
Can you imagine, he asked, what we can do in space in the next 100 years?
Morning Call reporter Kayla Dwyer can be reached at 610-820-6554 or at kdwyer@mcall.com.
