Two years ago, veteran NASA physician-astronaut Norm Thagard was pondering a career change, possibly an academic post.
Now, he faces winter survival training in Russia and Kazakhstan next month as he prepares for the most challenging mission of his 16-year career as an astronaut - a three-month stint aboard the Russian Mir space station in 1995.The 50-year-old veteran of four space shuttle flights and his backup, biomedical engineer Bonnie Dunbar, depart next week for a year of training at Star City, the cosmonaut training facility that is Russia's equivalent of Houston's Johnson Space Center.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced the selections two weeks ago, the same day the shuttle Discovery blasted off with Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev as one of its six crew members.
The ground work for Thagard's unprecedented assignment in Russia began to fall quietly into place not long after his fourth shuttle flight in 1992.
"I said I'd like to fly again if there was opportunity," Thagard recalled telling a colleague. "But I said I thought it would be really neat to go fly in the Russian program."
In mid-1992, former President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the accords that called for Russian participation in a U.S. shuttle flight and American participation in a Mir mission. Last year, the two countries expanded the agreement to merge competing plans for separate international space stations.
The latest agreement calls for the United States to pay the Russians $100 million annually for four years to accumulate about 24 months of astronaut time aboard the Mir, in three- to six-month stints, for research activities that cannot be conducted aboard shorter space shuttle flights.
The United States lost its medical research prowess on the long-term effects of spaceflight two decades ago when it abandoned the Skylab space station.
"A lot of things have happened since then," noted Dunbar, a 44-year-old biomedical engineer who has logged three shuttle missions during 12 years as an astronaut.
According to the agreement, the Russians will launch a pair of science modules to Mir, each equipped with American diagnostic equipment so that Thagard and his Russian colleagues can conduct collaborative medical experiments.