Trailblazing Aside, Astronaut Corps Nominee Says a Job Well Done Is What Counts : The Reluctant Role Model

She’s a chemical engineer from Stanford. A medical doctor from Cornell. Formerly a physician for Peace Corps volunteers in West Africa. A doctor for CIGNA in Los Angeles.

Now Mae Carol Jemison, who spent her early youth in the black neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side, is about to become a U.S. astronaut, the first black woman to do so. But don’t expect her to tell you she’s going to be anyone’s role model.

In fact, she has been startled by the reaction to her appointment to the astronaut corps and the tendency of specific groups to claim her as their representative.

“Women look at me as a representative of women, blacks as a black, medical people as a doctor,” said Jemison, 30. “Stanford and Cornell claim me, the cities where I’ve lived. . . . But what’s important in the long run is whether I did my job and how well I did it. . . .

“It’s in different people’s minds,” she said. “I realize I am a member of any number of groups. If I do well, they may represent me from one group; if I screw up, then I denigrate that group.”

Talking to Youngsters

Since the announcement of her appointment 20 days ago, she has made 11 personal appearances on the East and West coasts, been given honorary certificates by politicians, and toasted by school alumni. She also has granted 39 individual interviews to TV and print media representatives.

Nevertheless, “you never say to yourself, ‘I’m going to grow up to be a role model, be a doctor or an astronaut,’ ” she said, taking a luncheon break from packing her belongings at her West Los Angeles home. “I like talking to students and young people and helping them to develop into who they are, rather than to tell them to be like me or do like me.”

When she applied to be an astronaut, she said, “there was no category stating man or woman. It asked whether you were applying for mission specialist or pilot. The shuttle instruments can’t give a damn whether you are a woman or a male. The job I do is dependent on me being me and being involved with what I do. I look at it as personal, as a job I have to do.”

When she reports to Johnson Space Center in Houston on Aug. 17, Jemison will become one of 14 women to join the astronaut corps since the program began in 1959. In her class of 15--which brings the NASA’s total astronaut membership to 99--there is one other woman, Jan Dozier of Huntsville, Ala.

(There are currently three black astronauts: Guion S. Bluford Jr., Charles F. Bolden Jr. and Frederick D. Gregory, all colonels in the armed forces. A fourth, civilian astronaut Ronald McNair, was killed in the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.)

Jemison, who applied for an astronaut position before the Challenger disaster--and renewed her application afterward--was not deterred by the fiery, televised catastrophe that claimed the lives of six crew members and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

“It was shocking, of course, and very sad,” she said. “People were killed and it was a great setback to the space program. But it didn’t cause me to change my mind at all. It didn’t have that kind of impact on me.”

Jemison, who has never been to the cape, never seen a launch in person and “didn’t see ‘The Right Stuff’ or read it,” will be living in Houston at least for the next five years. She will spend a year of training and evaluation before she can be assigned to a space mission. After being selected for a space assignment, astronauts spend two more years in training.

According to National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Stephen Nesbitt, many in Jemison’s astronaut class will have a good chance of being picked to staff NASA’s first space station, scheduled to be launched in the mid-1990s.

“It’s most likely many of them will be involved in that,” Nesbitt said. “They’re coming in now in the prime of their career and in the beginning of the space station era.”

Although Jemison admits to being career oriented, she appears to hold in even higher esteem some principles she explained to students at recent career day at her high school alma mater: “To realize their responsibility to themselves, develop their own program and do it. . . .”

‘I Wanted to Be a Scientist’

“When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a scientist. And I knew when the time was appropriate for me, I would apply to be an astronaut,” Jemison said. But she also has always been interested in dance, she said, especially modern jazz and African dancing, and has produced and choreographed dance shows. She likes football and basketball and during her freshman year at Stanford, at age 16, she played intramural co-ed football.

(She picked Stanford over other technical schools, she said, simply “because they had won the Rose Bowl back to back. They beat Ohio State in ’71 and then Michigan.”)

Jemison interned at County-USC Medical Center after getting her medical degree from Cornell University and served on staff at CIGNA Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles until her astronaut candidate appointment last month. Before joining CIGNA, she was a staff physician for Peace Corps volunteers is Sierra Leone, and also worked with Cambodian refugees at a camp in Thailand.

Jemison plans to drive to Houston and do some sightseeing along the way. “I’d like to see the Grand Canyon,” she said. “I’ve never been there.”

The doctor, who is single, said she does not discuss her personal life, except to say “I lead a normal social life.” And she does not feel that her busy career has interfered with socializing and dating. “I never felt I had to trade off one for another. I’ve never felt conflict about it.” To keep in shape, Jemison works out two or three times a week. “I don’t like running or jogging. I do jazz dancing and aerobic exercises and some weight training.”

Between public appearances recently, Jemison visited her parents at their home in Morgan Park, Ill. The family moved there from Woodlawn, an inner-city black neighborhood that she still calls a ghetto.

“They’re pretty low key,” she said of her parents. (Her father, Charlie, is a maintenance supervisor for United Charities of Chicago; her mother, Dorothy, is an elementary school English and math teacher.) “But they’re very enthusiastic for me. I was always interested in astronomy and science, and I read science-fiction novels. I think they always knew I would do this.”

Reminiscing about her childhood, Jemison said that she couldn’t remember a time when her parents didn’t stress education to their three children.

Jemison has two older siblings: Ada Jemison Bullock, the oldest, is an adolescent psychiatrist and lives in Austin, Tex.; Charles is a real estate broker in Chicago.

“I didn’t get straight A’s,” said Jemison, smiling. “But my sister always did. Maybe the reason I didn’t get straight A’s was because I did stuff because I enjoyed it.”