SPACE CENTER, Houston -- The five men and one woman set to fly the shuttle Discovery starting Monday privately call themselves the 'Zoo Crew' because of a variety of nicknames acquired during training.
The mission commander is Henry Hartsfield, 50, veteran of the fourth test flight of the first shuttle, who has been called 'Zeke' - a shortened version of 'zoo keeper.'
His crew consists of co-pilot Michael 'Superman' Coats, 38, mission specialists Steve 'Cheetah' Hawley, 32, Richard 'Tarzan' Mullane, 38, and Judith 'J.R.' Resnik, 35, and non-NASA payload specialist Charles D. Walker, 35.
'If I had one general comment that I could make perhaps on all of them, all of them have an extremely good sense of humor and, as a consequence, we have an awful lot of fun together,' Hartsfield said.
And happy workers make for productive workers, Hartsfield emphasized.
'Not only do we have fun together, but I could not have asked for a more talented crew .... There's not a dud in the bunch,' he said.
Hartsfield is the only veteran space flier in the bunch. He joined the astronaut corps in 1969 after the Air Force space program, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, was canceled.
The Birmingham, Ala., native holds a physics degree from Auburn, and a master's degree in engineering from the University of Tennessee. Hartsfield, an avid stamp collector, was inducted into the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame last year.
Flying in space is a dream come true for Walker, who, as a boy in Bedford, Ind., once used a bedsheet to parachute from a quarry wall and flew model rockets from a farmer's pasture. He skipped school in the seventh grade to watch John Glenn's launch.
Walker, an engineer with McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co., was rejected for an astronaut's job in 1978. But by helping design the biological processing machine aboard Discovery, he won a berth on a spaceship.
Walker said his role as a commercial spaceflier helps open up the space shuttle transportation system to future commerical ventures.
'The citizen-astronaut is another way ... that we are providing to expand on this resource, to give this resource its final fulfillment in allowing John or Suzy Doe to participate in what is really everyone's program,' he said.
Ms. Resnik, who enjoys being called by her initials, is the only female member of the crew. She decided to become an astronaut to expand her career opportunities as an electrical engineer.
She graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970 and then worked for RCA as a design engineer and briefly for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., as a biomedical engineer before earning her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1977.
Ms. Resnik, a native of Akron, Ohio, was among the first female astronauts selected by NASA in 1978. She will become the second American woman to fly into space, behind Sally Ride.
However, she downplays the distinction.
'I think the major significance of my being on this flight is not so much that I'm the second woman, but that I am the 40th or 45th, or whatever the number is, American astronaut to go on the space shuttle in a period of a couple of years and how far we've come in a few years,' she said.
One man who understands that attitude is Hawley. He is married to Sally Ride.
'Most people who meet me, and don't know who I am, are more interested in Sally. It doesn't bother me,' Hawley said.
'I think it bothers her, but we don't let it. It's not big enough to worry about.'
Hawley, is considered the 'Mr. Spock' of this shuttle crew because of his computer-like memory and scientific knowledge.
He holds a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California and undergraduate degrees in physics and astronomy, with highest honors, from the University of Kansas. Hawley's interest in space prompted him to join the astronaut corps in 1978, where he and Ms. Ride met. They married four years later.
Coats, a Navy pilot, said the transition from military flying to the astronaut corps was natural for him.
The son of an Air Force bomber pilot, Coats, grew up with airplanes. He attended the U.S Naval Academy and then was sent to Vietnam for two year where he earned more than 46 flying awards for 350 combat missions.
Coats, who enjoys watching professional football and reading historical novels, considers Riverside, Calif., his hometown.
Like Coats, crewmate Mullane had dreams of being a jet fighter pilot. However, his eyesight deprived him of that goal.
Instead, the 38-year-old graduate of the U.S. Military Academy trained as a weapons systems operator and ended up serving in Vietnam, where he completed 150 combat missions.
A flight on Discovery is a dream come true for Mullane, who won his high school science fair by building and flying model rockets near his hometown of Albuquerque, N.M.
