Gregory Jarvis 1944-1986

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 last month, Jarvis was again disappointed when he was bumped in favor of Florida Democratic Congressman Bill Nelson.

Born in Detroit, Jarvis moved with his family a year later to the tiny upstate New York village of Mohawk (current pop. 2,959). After graduating from Mohawk High School and receiving a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, Jarvis earned a master's degree in engineering from Northeastern University in Boston. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1969, became a specialist in tactical communications satellites at the Air Force Space Division in El Segundo, Calif., and rose to the rank of captain. During his time in the service, he worked on advanced tactical communications satellites. He left the Air Force in 1973 to join the Hughes Aircraft Co. as an engineer. There, Jarvis was again working on the design of advanced satellites when NASA asked Hughes to recommend one of its employees to be a payload specialist on the shuttle. Jarvis was among 600 workers who applied.

Jarvis' assignment aboard Challenger was to conduct a series of experiments to determine the effects of weightlessness on fluid contained in tanks. His findings, Hughes officials hoped, would help in the design of future communications satellites.

Balding and athletic, Jarvis lived with his wife Marcia in a sunny lemon- yellow house six blocks from the Pacific Ocean in Hermosa Beach, Calif. He passed his spare hours practicing classical guitar, playing squash and, of course, bicycling. Five summers ago, he and Marcia spent the summer touring Canada on a tandem bicycle.

A self-acknowledged workaholic and a firm believer in the value of education, Jarvis also found time to attend night classes at West Coast University in Los Angeles. He had completed work on a master's degree in management science, which was to have been awarded last week during a ceremony aboard the shuttle. "This was to be a special moment for us," said Norman Oglesby, dean of the business college at West Coast. "We're a small university, and one of our own was going into space. One of our guys was making good." When Jarvis climbed into the shuttle last week, he was carrying a flag from the school he considered his real alma mater, SUNY at Buffalo. He called the banner "a small token for the way they unlocked my future."