Family, friends cheer on McAllen astronaut

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Family, friends cheer on McAllen astronaut

 

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA071806.1A.valley.space.169b85e.html

http://tinyurl.com/zs9yd

 

Web Posted: 07/17/2006 11:02 PM CDT

Jesse Bogan

Rio Grande Valley Bureau

 

McALLEN The recent e-mail from outer space informed the small group the voyage had been safe and rewarding.

 

Their supporting role was almost over.

 

"Now the shuttle is just about packed and ready to come home," astronaut Mike Fossum, 48, who grew up in McAllen, wrote them from the space shuttle Discovery on Sunday. "We're all ready, too our objectives have been met."

 

Hours later, on Monday morning, they gathered before a large television screen in Fossum's boyhood home, where he had acquired some of the skills that carried him through the 5.3 million-mile trip to a space station and back.

 

The group had formed to support Fossum's mother, Pat, 74, whose congestive heart failure left her watching the landing from a hospital bed at McAllen Medical Center, where her son had called her directly from space a few times.

 

Just before the shuttle came into view 9 miles out, some of the dozen watchers clasped their hands, as if to pray it to a safe landing.

 

"Discovery. Houston. On at the 90," went the cockpit chatter.

 

"Oh, look. Oh, look at that. Praise the Lord," said Paula Lindgren, 74, the group's leader, who took pictures of the TV screen. "Gives me goose bumps. Look at it."

 

"I didn't know they had wheels," said Sue Schmidt, 75, drawing laughs.

 

"I thought they landed in the ocean," said Sylvia Wilson, an oxygen tube in her nose.

 

The friends and neighbors of Pat Fossum, many who knew her astronaut son when he was a boy, watched from the three-bedroom home on North Fifth Street that he grew up in.

 

"We all love our kids, but she is wrapped up in her kids," Lindgren said. "They are her life."

 

They sat in an assortment of chairs, from an orange recliner to a green couch, in a family room frozen in the 1970s with mementos of Fossum's youth, including Pinewood Derby ribbons and other awards he and his two brothers won, mainly in the Boy Scouts.

 

"Nothing has changed, which makes it nostalgic for me," Diana Weisser, 55, who babysat the Fossum boys, said of the home.

 

She cried when she saw the touchdown from space, the first for a Rio Grande Valley native.

 

Pat Fossum spoke via speakerphone to her friends at the landing party. She said she had a feeling the 13-day trip would be a success and pointed out that her son "wasn't the one who dropped the spatula," referring to a tool an astronaut accidentally let go of while doing repairs.

 

"It's been extremely exciting, but how proud can a mother be?" she said, answering reporters' questions. "I am proud of all my boys."

 

Her sons are Eagle Scouts. Besides Mike, who lives in Houston, there is Greg, 46, a dentist in Corpus Christi, and Terry, 42, who owns a marketing firm in Spokane, Wash.

 

"As for kids in the Valley, not even the sky is the limit anymore," Terry Fossum said.

 

"There's a perception that the Valley isn't the best place to grow up and achieve great things. That's absolutely not true," he added. "Mike is just one example of the great things that have come out of this area."

 

Their father, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's screw worm eradication program, died 25 years ago in a plane wreck. Pat retired from teaching nursing at University of Texas Pan American in nearby Edinburg.

 

A 1976 graduate of McAllen High School, Mike Fossum earned a degree in mechanical engineering and was in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M University. Two master's degrees followed in technology fields. He's a colonel in the Air Force Reserves and has worked as a test flight engineer.

 

Teaching the astronomy merit badge in the Scouts seeded his interest in space, Terry Fossum said. He described his brother as goal-oriented and persistent.

 

He'd been passed up for at least two other missions.

 

"His bosses were telling him at NASA, 'You're too old. Give it up; you're not going to be an astronaut,'" Terry Fossum said. "His answer was, 'No, I don't know that.'"

 

The payoff showed in the note he sent before coming home, describing how he was "silenced by the beauty of God's creation as it rolls under our ship" and thankful for his "profoundly tolerant" wife and four kids.

 

And how he was "humbled by this opportunity of a lifetime."

 

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jbogan@express-news.net

San Antonio Express-News publish date July 18, 2006