SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) -- More than half a century ago, on a 1,000 acre dairy farm in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, a 5-year-old boy learned the art of tractor repair.

Know your tools. Know your machine. Keep it going -- improvise, if need be. "I got used to tools and wrenches. I got used to making do, keeping things running," he says now. "I really think that kind of making do when you're that young, it's a learning you get and you never forget it. So here I am now, working with Hubble. Here I am, a Hubble mechanic."

Story Musgrave -- 58-year-old astronaut, surgeon, mathematician, computer analyst, pilot, parachutist, ex-Marine, student of the humanities and metaphysics, believer in intelligent life in outer space -- is about to tackle the biggest repair job of his life.

When the space shuttle Endeavor lifts of December 1, Musgrave will be its payload commander and chief spacewalker. His mission: to fix the Hubble Space Telescope's nearsightedness and other maladies. Over the course of the 11-day flight, he will become only the third person in the world to fly in space at least five times; the first person to fly five times on a space shuttle and the oldest person to take a spacewalk. Not bad for a high school dropout.

But then, Musgrave is, and always has been, as unconventional as his name. (Story, a family name, is actually his middle name. No one, not even his parents, ever called him by his real first name -- Franklyn.)

This is no stolid, stoic exemplar of the "Right Stuff" -- Musgrave admits to being terrified at liftoff. "Riding the solids (solid rocket boosters) is tough. It's very very scary for me."

He racks up academic degrees even faster than he racks up missions. He has two bachelor's, three master's, including one in literature earned in 1987, and a doctorate in medicine. For relaxation, he studies the humanities at the University of Houston at Clear lake.

He talks freely of his belief in "life forms out there that are millions, hundreds of millions of years older than us that are incredibly tuned to things" and how he tries to communicate with them when he's in space. "I've got nothing to lose," he explains. "While I'm circling around out there, I try whatever ways I can to get them to come down here and get me. You know I'm a realist. The probabilities are incredibly slim. But what is the greatest thing that could possibly happen to me? In my wildest dreams, the greatest thing that I could do is to have something come down from out there and go take a space ride with them."

If this sounds like the commander of the starship Enterprise, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, on the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Musgrave and Picard share one other attribute: both are completely bald. People make the comparison "all the time" he says unperturbed.

Musgrave left high school before there was a space program, quitting St. Mark's School in Southborough, Mass., in 1953 just weeks before graduation to join the Marines. That led to airplane mechanics, flying, college, medical school and, ultimately, NASA. Along the way, he received his St. Mark's diploma.

He was among 11 men chosen as astronauts in 1967, six years after the first man flew in space and two years before the first men walked on the moon. He helped design Skylab. He helped design shuttle spacewalking gear -- in fact, he made the first shuttle spacewalk in 1983. And he helped to ensure that the Hubble Space Telescope would be spacewalker-friendly, so that once it was in orbit, astronauts could visit every few years and make repairs and improvements. No one imagined so many repairs would be needed so soon.

NASA launched the celebrated $1.5 billion telescope in April 1990. Two months later, the space agency suffered one of the greatest embarrassments in its 30-some years --the telescope was found to have an improperly ground mirror that blurred its view of extremely distant objects. Other problems followed: gyroscopes broke, solar panels shuddered, magnetometers faltered, computer memory boards failed. Massive surgery was needed. Musgrave was put in charge early last year.

Musgrave and three other experienced spacewalkers will go out in pairs to work on Hubble, at least five and perhaps seven times. They plan to insert corrective lenses, about the size of a phone booth, install a new camera and replace as many defective parts as possible.

The pressure is intense. Musgrave says this mission has put "more weight on my shoulders" than any other. He's tried to deflect pressure from his crewmates. "If somebody from up above is going to whip on somebody, they can whip on me," Musgrave says, his words soft and slow, as always, but firm. He adds: "I don't think you can whip me." Musgrave refuses to define mission success, or failure. "I'm not an accountant. I don't work that way. I do not work that way," he insists. "I know other people do. Other people have to set criteria. They need to draw a line: if these things get done it's a success. When I get back, then I will say whether I considered it a success or not."

Musgrave and the other spacewalkers -- Jeffrey Hoffman, Musgrave's partner, and Tom Akers and Kathryn Thornton -- have spent nearly 400 hours underwater, training for the spacewalks, and as much if not more time in the gym and at home building up their muscles. Musgrave is seldom without a small rubber ball, constantly squeezing it to strengthen his hands, which bear the brunt of spacewalk work. A hand injury nearly cost him the mission; his fingers were frostbitten while testing Hubble tools inside a frigid vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center last May. Seventeen years separate Musgrave and Thornton, the youngest Hubble spacewalker at 41. And eight years separate him and the oldest spacewalker to date -- cosmonaut Gennady Strekalov, who stepped outside Russia's Mir station at age 50 three years ago. But Musgrave is in prime condition -- he is 5-foot-10, 152 pounds, and runs, scuba dives and goes soaring. And age, he says, assists the spacewalker. "As things get more and more complex, experience counts for more and more. It is not a simple task that requires some brute force or some simply instinctual reaction," he says. "Thirty is not the prime of life. Neither is 40 or 50. I'm still looking for it. Things are still getting better."

Twice-divorced and currently single, Musgrave lives with one of his five children, 29-year-old Holly. His house is just two miles from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where work days sometimes last from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. He considers space his calling, even though "there's a myriad of paths I could have taken in life and had a glorious time" and even though it's a dangerous business. He figures he'll probably die on the job "one way or the other."

"You know, the night before a launch, I go down and I lie in the ocean and look at the stars and I see some satellites going overhead and I say, 'Tomorrow you're going to be one of those. See that streak? That's you tomorrow.' And I look over and see the xenon lights on the vehicle, or I go by early in the morning if I've got a night launch and watch the fog drifting over that thing. I tell myself, 'Hey, you're never going to do this again.' And I cannot accept that. I cannot give it up. I can not walk away."