The right stuff for NASA.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Rhoda Love, 73, got down on the floor of her south Eugene home on her blue jeaned knees, gazed at photographs of her mop-headed son frozen in play, and mused.

"He was just an ordinary-looking kid," she said. "You'd never know he was going to grow up to be an astronaut, would you?"

Stan Love, son of Rhoda and her husband, Glen, is a hale and hearty NASA astronaut who will fly next fall to the international space station.

That boy is today a brilliant man who stands among the elite few with the right stuff - a rising star - and so difficult for his parents to explain.

How do you raise an astronaut?

Not like kids are raised today, the Loves said. You don't push, don't nag, don't muss, don't fuss, no day camp, no genius camp, no private school, no alternative school.

The Loves took their cues from the nonchalance school of parenting with their two offspring, Stan and his younger sister, Jenny.

"I just kind of sat back and watched them grow," Rhoda said.

"We had no particular twig bending in mind. They just did their own thing, found what they liked," Glen said.

Grand adventure

The Loves did provide a steady base for their kids. They moved into a house on a hill near Wayne Morse Ranch when Stan was 2 months old and stayed there.

Glen taught in the University of Oregon English department for 30 years. Rhoda earned her doctorate in botany then taught botany, ecology and biology at Lane Community College, also for 30 years.

Rhoda arranged her schedule so she'd greet her kids when they got home from school because, she said, there was a small window of time when they'd share their problems and triumphs before they were distracted by play.

They'd slam out the door and run free on Ful Vue Drive, a half-mile squiggle of a street, populated with a dozen other kids. "They'd climb trees, they'd build forts in the woods, they'd whiz around on their bikes, they'd go down to Amazon Pool," Rhoda said. When Stan was 6 years old, the family took a nine-month sabbatical. They traveled by ship from British Columbia across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand.

The boy saw the crystalline heavens undimmed by human lights. He stood at the helm as the ship slipped through the water. He was entranced, his mother said.

When Stan returned to Eugene, his first grade teacher rolled the TV cart into the Crest Elementary School classroom for each new space program development.

Stan ate his lunch from a John Glenn pail.

Stan said the strongest suits he got from his upbringing were curiosity and an ethic of not quitting. "They always encouraged me to learn everything I possibly could," he said.

In fourth grade, Stan asked his mother for help figuring out how long it would take a space ship to get to another star under a constant rate of acceleration. She advised that algorithms would be the easiest means of computation.

In high school, Stan told his parents that he should have a computer. They about broke their necks rushing out to buy one, Rhoda said.

The first was a Texas Instruments 99-4.

Then, an Apple II with a whopping 48 kilobytes of memory. Stan taught himself to program, then began programming mathematical problems, Rhoda said.

Seven applications to NASA

When Stan was in graduate school and he first told his parents he was submitting an application to the NASA astro- naut programs, they didn't seem all that impressed.

"They were like, `Well, OK,' '' Stan remembers.

The Loves are not the kind of parents to hang on their children's accomplishments, Stan said. "They have their own. They've done a lot of great stuff. They don't need to define themselves based on what their kid does."

The Loves take credit for giving Stan little more than a loving home, and, oh yes, stature. Glen is 6-foot-5, Rhoda is 5-foot-8 and Stan is 6-foot-2.

Stan sent NASA an application each year for seven years.

He said he worked at it casually, the way he pursued his childhood enthusiasms. Others bent their life around the goal of becoming an astronaut and got bitter when they weren't picked, he said.

Instead, Stan studied the subjects he was interested in while making sure they matched NASA requirements.

He looked upon his annual application to NASA like buying a lottery ticket. "It wasn't a story of dogged determination," he said.

Three years in a row he made the 20-person finalist pool. He'd fly to Houston, take medical tests and face an interview panel (one interviewer was John Young, who Stan realized was flying Gemini capsules when Stan was a fetus). Then, Stan went home to wait for the call, and in two of those years the answer was no.

He'd brush away any disappointment. Touring the Houston headquarters was "cool," he said. Then, in 1998, NASA said yes.

Thrilled, Stan leapt to the phone and called his parents, who were delighted with their son's happiness but were nonetheless mystified: "Why do you want to do that? Isn't that kind of dangerous?" they said.

The fate of the world

Then, last year, months before Stan even got his date with his destiny in space, he was half of a two-man team that invented a way to save the world from colliding with an asteroid.

This is not science fiction. Scientists figure an asteroid collision killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Today, astronomers track incoming asteroids, such as a 1,000-foot-wide rock they named Apophis, which is due for a near scrape in 2029 and again in 2036.

Many scientists worry about this. So, one day, Stan Love and astronaut Edward Lu started working the problem.

Blowing up the asteroid as per Bruce Willis in the movie "Armageddon" was no good because the bits could rain on the Earth. Attaching a rocket to nudge the asteroid off its path was problematic because it would be difficult to dock the high-speed rock.

Love and Lu realized the rescue craft doesn't have to touch the asteroid. All it has to do is hover above the hurling rock, and slowly - over a year's time - allow its mass to exert just enough gravitational pull to change the asteroid's course. "It's a simple, little, neat, elegant solution," Glen Love said.

The discovery of this gravitational "tractor beam" was ballyhooed in newspaper reports after Love and Lu published a write-up in Nature magazine - "the premier journal of science," Glen confides.

The Loves were clued into their son's feat when friends began mailing clippings from their far-flung newspapers - accounts of their mop-haired son's scientific heroism.

"It surprised us, because he didn't tell us he was working on it at all," Rhoda said. "We asked him about it and he said, `Yeah, we just sat down with our computers and worked it out.' ''

LANE COUNTY'S NASA CONNECTION August 1965: Future astronaut Stanley Love, age 2 months, moves to Eugene when his father takes a job in the University of Oregon English department.

November 1968: Future astronaut Jim Dutton is born at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene.

January 1986: Shuttle Challenger explodes on takeoff, killing all on board. Love, 20, has graduated from Churchill High School and is studying physics at college. Dutton, 17, is attending Sheldon High School.

June 1998: Love learns that NASA has chosen him as an astronaut candidate. He expects a first flight within three years, but it takes three times that long.

June 1998: Astronaut Wendy Lawrence carries red and black ribbons into space to remember the victims of an infamous shooting at Thurston High in Springfield. Lawrence's parents, Ralph and Anne Haynes, live and work in Lane County.

February 2003: Shuttle Columbia disintegrates over Texas upon reentry, killing all seven aboard and unnerving parents of local astronauts.

August 2004: Dutton reports to NASA for astronaut training. He's the son-in-law of Eugene residents Rod and Nancy Ruhoff.

August 2005: Lawrence goes on a fourth shuttle mission into space. The trip was billed as the "Return to Flight" after loss of the Columbia in 2003.

March 2006: Dutton finishes astronaut training and is assigned to NASA's Exploration branch, where he hopes for future trips to the moon and Mars.

May 2006: After eight years, Love is assigned to Shuttle Mission 122 set to blast off in fall 2007.