Shuttle Crew Tried And Tried Again

Space shuttle Atlantis' pilot, Scott Horowitz, was in junior high school when he started nagging NASA.

"I want to be an astronaut," he said in repeated phone calls.

Once Horowitz was old enough, it took him seven tries, he thinks. Actually, he's lost count. But he finally made it into the astronaut corps, in 1992.

"I just bugged them long enough, they gave up and hired me," he jokes.

Horowitz, an Air Force officer, isn't the only tenacious fellow on Atlantis' upcoming service call on the international space station. Of the six Americans scheduled to rocket away this afternoon aboard Atlantis, four -- the four military men -- applied several times each.

Repeat contenders are actually rather common in NASA's 137-member astronaut corps, says Duane Ross, manager of the astronaut selection office.

Of the 3,015 people who applied for the soon-to-be-announced Class of 2000, more than half of the names "had been in the hopper a while," Ross says.

Only 20 will make the cut. Competition, consequently, is intense.

Ross encourages those who don't make it to keep trying.

"We tell them, absolutely, persistence is a good thing provided it's tempered with a little judgment," Ross says. Every so often, "we have folks whom we hear from more often than we probably need to. You might wonder about a person's judgment, how they deal with situations."

Atlantis astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who will be making his first space flight, says he didn't take rejection personally when he first applied to be an astronaut. Or the second, third, fourth and fifth time he applied. He got in on try No. 6, in 1996, after 10 long years.

"I knew that if I continued to aspire to do this, the biggest thing I had going against me is not applying. So I just kept throwing in an application," says Williams, an Army officer.

Adds James Voss, a recently retired Army colonel assigned to Atlantis' mission: "I was six times over nine years applying. These Army guys are persistent."

Atlantis' commander, Air Force Col. James Halsell Jr., applied for every astronaut class from 1978 to 1990. That's when he finally made it.

As for Atlantis' three other crew members, one is a veteran Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Usachev. That leaves Air Force Col. Susan elms and civilian scientist Mary Ellen Weber.

The two women got in on the first shot, a point not lost on their crewmates.

"Rub it in," Horowitz teased Weber when she acknowledged it took her a single try. "Some people are naturals. Some of us had to work a little harder. That's kind of the way I do everything, isn't it? Force method."