Female-led crew gets ready for mission

By Marcia Dunn

updated 5:28 p.m. ET Oct. 20, 2007

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA’s next space shuttle crew, made up of six Americans and an Italian, has a woman in charge.

Retired Air Force Col. Pamela Melroy will sit in the coveted front left seat of the cockpit when Discovery blasts off Tuesday on a mission to deliver a new live-in compartment to the international space station.

She is only the second woman to command a shuttle flight — and “exceedingly grateful” she wasn’t the first. Ex-astronaut Eileen Collins was — in 1999 and again in 2005.

“It’s a tremendous additional burden with all the other responsibilities that you have as a commander to carry that with you,” Melroy said last month. “I don’t particularly care for the spotlight.”

Three of Melroy’s crewmates are space veterans like herself and three are rookies.

Here’s a quick look at all seven:

Mission commander Pamela Melroy does not see herself as a female leader.

“I am a Pam leader,” she said, noting that every leader is unique. It took her a while to find her own leadership style, one she is comfortable with.

Melroy, 46, who has degrees in science, is from Rochester, N.Y. She got her military start with the Air Force ROTC program in 1983. She flew the KC-10 at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., and went on to test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. She became an astronaut in 1995 and flew twice in space as the co-pilot.

Following the 2003 Columbia disaster, Melroy focused on reconstruction of the crew module and was deputy project manager for a team that investigated crew survival issues. She retired from the Air Force earlier this year.

Her husband, Douglas Hollett, a geologist, is vice president for Southeast Asia exploration at Marathon Oil Corp.

Pilot George Zamka never considered spaceflight within his reach, even when he was in the Marines.

The 45-year-old colonel and former fighter pilot was enjoying his military career when someone at test pilot school suggested he apply to the astronaut corps. It took a couple tries, but he finally was selected in 1998. This will be his first shuttle flight.

He ranks spaceflight as risky as combat flying.

“So how do I deal with that? I have faith in our team, in the good will of our folks to handle situations as best as they know how, that they don’t take anything lightly, they don’t take anything as an automatic and that they’re well trained and that we have tools developed to be able to handle things. And the rest that you can’t worry about, you can’t control, you just don’t worry about it.”

Zamka is married with a 13-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.

He grew up in Medellin, Colombia; New York; and Rochester Hills, Mich.

Dr. Scott Parazynski is the crew’s chief spacewalker and outdoor repairman.

He will use his medical skills to practice patching deliberately damaged shuttle tiles in a first-ever space demo of a high-tech caulking gun and goo.

“The tile that you’re working on, of course, is silica glass. It’s very brittle so if you were to nudge the tile with the applicator tip, for example, you could make the damage a lot worse,” he said. “So like in medicine, first do no harm.”

Besides being a doctor, Parazynski, 46, is an instrument-rated pilot and mountaineer. He was ranked among the nation’s top 10 competitors in luge during the 1988 Olympic Trials, while still in medical school. He became an astronaut in 1992. This will be his fifth spaceflight; on his third, he flew with John Glenn.

Parazynski is married with a 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter, and considers home Palo Alto, Calif. and Evergreen, Colo. He is taking into space two Roosevelt medals that were presented to those who helped build the Panama Canal, “the moon shot of its era.” One of the chief engineers was his great-great-grand-uncle.

Army Col. Douglas Wheelock spent 10 days living underwater as a NASA aquanaut three years ago. Now he gets a shot at space.

He will make three spacewalks on his first mission, something he’s been aiming for ever since he became an astronaut in 1998.

“I keep kind of kidding with the rest of the crew. I say, ’Gosh, I hope we hurry up and launch so they don’t figure out they picked the wrong guy,”’ he said.

More seriously, he said: “Being able to look at the shuttle and the station silhouetted against deep space and silhouetted against the planet, I think it’s going to just take my breath away.”

The 47-year-old aviator is from Windsor, N.Y. He is married with a 20-year-old daughter.

Wheelock is taking into space a jersey and baseball card belonging to former New York Yankee Bobby Mercer, his boyhood hero who had surgery in December for a brain tumor. The two have since become friends.

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