Family, friends cheer on McAllen astronaut

Family, friends cheer on McAllen astronaut

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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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San Antonio Express-News publish date July 18, 2006