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Former Los Alamos Resident Trains Crew for Discovery Voyage

Posted on: Friday, 13 May 2005, 15:00 CDT

Former Los Alamos resident Cindy Begley is an unsung hero of the U.S. space program and will play a pivotal role in NASA's first voyage back into space following the destruction of space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

The space agency is scheduled to launch space shuttle Discovery on July 13 and has dubbed the mission Return to Flight.

The crew's mission to the International Space Station includes three space walks. And that's where Begley steps in. In the alphabet soup of NASA jargon, Begley is called the lead EVA officer, or extravehicular-activity officer, on the mission. More simply stated, Begley is in charge of training the astronauts who will don the techno-marshmallow spacesuits and monitoring their strolls in space.

It's her duty to plan, step by step and task by task, what each astronaut will do when he or she is outside the shuttle or space station. The job begins up to two years before a shuttle mission is scheduled to lift off and a year before the crew is selected.

During preparation for a mission, Begley's favorite task is to lead missions on the Vomit Comet, a specially outfitted cargo airplane that makes steep dives that create a sense of weightlessness. It also produces a sense of nausea in some, and that's where it gains its colorful name.

She also said she enjoys climbing into a spacesuit and jumping into NASA's NBL, or Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a 50-cent name for an immense pool containing 6.2 million gallons of water and capable of holding mock-ups of the shuttle and space station.

"It's tougher than you think," Begley said during a phone interview Thursday from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "It takes a lot of upper-body strength, and it helps to be tall and have long arms, which unfortunately isn't the case for me."

With the moratorium against manned spaceflights that followed the destruction of Columbia, Begley and crew have been readying for this mission for more than three years. Even when the preparation period isn't as long as it is for the Return to Flight mission, strong friendships develop among NASA trainers and their crews. The depth of such friendships was evident after the Columbia disaster, which hangs over the agency.

"You can imagine, we were all in shock," Begley said. "The astronauts are not strangers to us. They're friends, family and people we work with very closely. Our kids are on the same soccer teams. It was devastating."

The incident, she said, has made NASA officials even more focused on doing their jobs right and ensuring the flight crew's safety.

"The mood now is very optimistic," Begley said. "We're very excited to get started again and getting back to what we do best."

The job still holds a sense of adventure for Begley, who said she has done just about everything one can do in her position, and she hopes to someday take the next step in her career. "Every year, I put in my application to become an astronaut and hope to get selected someday," Begley said. "More exciting things are to come: going back to the moon and Mars."

It's a grand goal she has set, but she said she has always maintained high standards for herself, a practice she learned from her parents. "I can't remember them ever sitting me down and saying, 'You will go to college,' " she said. "But it was just what was expected. It was taken for granted that you'd do well and go to college."

Begley, an Army brat who moved frequently, attended Los Alamos High School her junior and senior years. She credited a math teacher at the school for encouraging her to pursue engineering in college and taught her, she said, that engineers weren't just people in trains.

After receiving a degree in engineering from Georgia Tech University, she returned to Los Alamos for a time and worked in health care. She hasn't visited Los Alamos since her 20-year high- school reunion in 2002, she said. But she still has fond memories of the area and culture, which she called "beautiful."

"I'd rather be there getting some blue-corn tortillas and sopaipillas," she said.

Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

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