The day before Challenger was launched into space, Gregory Jarvis took a leisurely bicycle ride around the Kennedy Space Center. "For any contingency, they know what to do," he said of his NASA colleagues on the ground. "So I feel very, very comfortable. I'm excited, but not nervous."
Jarvis approached his career as an astronaut, and life generally, with that same comfortable equanimity. Selected as a shuttle crew member in 1984, he was supposed to make his first flight on Discovery last April but was dropped to make way for Republican Senator Jake Garn of Utah. Rescheduled to fly on Columbia...