The child of Baptist missionaries, Shannon Lucid grew up in China, Texas and Oklahoma wishing she could go back in time.
She yearned to be a pioneer, crossing the American frontier in a covered wagon. Yet here she was, stuck in the well-mapped world of the 20th century.So she looked to the future.
"Well, shoot, I can be a space explorer," she told herself. "No one's going to get space all explored before I grow up."
Those little-girl dreams have come true, many times over.
This week, the 53-year-old Lucid - one of NASA's original female astronauts - will rocket into orbit aboard shuttle Atlantis. Her destination? Russia's space station Mir, which will be her home for nearly five months.
She will be only the second American, and the first American woman, to live on Mir, and the first woman to fly in space five times. What's more, if all goes well, she will set a U.S. space endurance record.
"It's sort of amazing how things have worked out," Lucid says. "A lot of it is being at the right time at the right place."
For now, the time is early March, and the place is Houston. After a year of training at cosmonaut headquarters in Star City outside Moscow, Lucid has returned to her husband of nearly 30 years and their three children.
This visit is far too short. She's scheduled to leave Earth on Thursday and won't be back until Atlantis swings by Mir to pick her up in August and drop off another American astronaut.
"It would have been nice to have a week's vacation," Lucid said during a countdown rehearsal at the Kennedy Space Center.
If her two daughters and one son were still young - they range in age from 20 to 27 - Lucid says she never would have considering moving to Russia and flying off to Mir.
She agreed to go "because it's something really different." She doesn't dwell on the risks of flight - never has. "You could live in a padded room if you wanted to, but that wouldn't be much of a life," she says.
"I thought it would be a real adventure. It was something not many people got a chance to do," she explains.
"I don't mean to say there haven't been bad things. With any job, you have bad days. You have your frustrations. But I've really enjoyed it."
The No. 1 frustration, for Lucid, is the Russian language. After a year of study, she considers her Russian "marginal."
A biochemist by training, she says she has no language aptitude. Because she's concentrated on the technical language, she feels especially deficient in everyday Russian.
The two Russian cosmonauts who arrived at Mir in late February, and with whom Lucid will spend most of her five months, speak little English. She won't have trouble remembering or saying their names: Yuri and Yuri.
"Due to my lack of Russian conversational skills, we haven't had any deep, in-depth conversations," Lucid says. "But they have been very, very nice to me, sort of bending backward to make me feel like I'm part of the crew."
"Except for the fact they speak Russian, they could be like any number of the guys" in NASA's astronaut office, she says.
Lucid says she's never felt any discrimination by her male colleagues - in either country. Sure, the first questions Russians ask is if she's married and where's her husband. But that's usually the end of it.
David Leestma, director of NASA's flight crew operations, says most of the sex barriers were broken in 1994 by NASA astronaut Bonnie Dunbar. She was the backup to Norman Thagard, who was launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket to Mir in March 1995 and lived on the station for nearly four months.
"Shannon's personality will allow her to overlook anything if it does occur," Thagard says. "Shannon is very much her own person. On the other hand, she's not a supersensitive person."
It helps, perhaps, having spent most of her life in the minority.
Born in Shanghai, Lucid was 6 weeks old when she and her missionary parents became prisoners of war in 1943. The family spent a year in a Japanese concentration camp before being released in a prisoner exchange. They fled to the United States and returned to China when World War II ended but had to leave again when the Communists took over.
During the 1960s, Lucid often was the only woman in her chemistry classes at the University of Oklahoma. And she was among the first women chosen by NASA as astronauts in 1978; there were six women in that class and 29 men.
Of the four NASA astronauts who will take turns living on Mir over the next two years, Lucid is the only woman.
In fact, only two women have ever lived on the cramped station, a Briton and a Russian.
The Russian, Yelena Kondakova, offered hints about living on Mir but "we didn't talk about getting along with the guys," Lucid says.
Thagard, she says, provided the most insight.
Based on Thagard's recommendation, Lucid sampled the Russian space food so she could pick what she liked. Thagard lost 171/2 pounds on Mir, primarily because of a limited food selection.
Lucid also has devised what she hopes is a foolproof way of staying in touch with her family. While on Mir, Thagard had sporadic contact with his wife and three sons and warned of "cultural isolation" for an American on a Russian spacecraft.
Her younger daughter, a computer scientist, devised a way for her mother, while in Russia, to communicate daily with the family via CompuServe. She plans to use the same method once she's on Mir, routing messages through the NASA flight surgeon at Russia's Mission Control.
"Every day, under pain of death, my family is sending a message to my CompuServe account in Russia, and the flight doc will pick it up and when he gets a chance to talk to me he'll read the messages up to me," she said.
Unfortunately, there's no way around one of the biggest dilemmas Thagard faced: too much idle time because of delays by the Russians in sending up U.S. science equipment.
At the very least, she'll have plenty to read. She sent her daughters on a book-shopping spree in Houston.