The Bell Curve:

Omega watches, which have kept time for several generations of astronauts at work, has mounted a space show that landed in South Coast Plaza last week.

It celebrated the 40th anniversary of putting a man on the moon and attracted a standing-room-only audience. The centerpiece was an interview onstage of three veteran astronauts spanning several decades of space exploration: Cmdr. Scott Carpenter for the Mercury pioneers and Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Stafford and Capt. Gene Cernan for Gemini and Apollo.

And because I wrote the first book on our manned space program — called “Seven Into Space” — I figured it might be a good idea to listen in.

There’s a picture in my book of me standing on the tarmac at Langley Field, Va., talking with a young, svelte Carpenter, as he was training to become our third astronaut to orbit the Earth.

Four decades later, he’s the first speaker on the Omega panel, a gray and slightly portly 83 with the humor lines intact, especially while the audience was being thanked “for coming out on a Saturday afternoon to hear three old fogies talking about something that happened yesterday.”

At the risk of sounding redundant, this old fogy would like to add a few splotches of color to the times in which this all began. When a young Russian pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth in 1961, Russia owned outer space.

And when President Kennedy challenged us to pass the Russians and be the first to set foot on the moon, it seemed a near impossibility — especially at a time when we were deeply divided over a war in Vietnam and struggling to preserve the balance of power in conventional armaments.

That was the situation on a steamy April day in 1959 in Washington, D.C., when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration introduced the seven test pilots who had been selected to put us back in the race for the moon and serve as point men in turning public attention away from our troubles and onto our mission in space. Their introduction caught this tone. The NASA press chief waved a hand at these seven remarkably at-ease young men dressed in business suits and said to the assembled reporters: “Gentlemen, these are the astronaut volunteers.”

Almost overnight they became public heroes. And although they were pilots and technicians, not the stuff of public relations, they took naturally to that role by being themselves.

They were, first of all, the ultimate prototypes of the WASP culture that had always ruled America’s power structures. All seven were raised in small American towns. All had at least one brother or sister. All were white and Protestant, and came from middle- to upper-class homes. All were former combat pilots in one of America’s holy wars. And all were in superb physical condition, strongly motivated and apparently highly self-assured.

The media fought for access to them, and so partly in self-protection and partly because of the $500,000 divided among them, the Mercury Astronauts sold their private lives collectively to Life Magazine, then an enormous power in American publishing.

For more than three years, Life carried stories in virtually every issue about the astronauts. And the few voices that were raised in protest over the cost of this pursuit were drowned in a symphony of adulation.

The editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, Clifford Hicks, considered the astronauts public property, and the exclusivity of Life illegal. So did I. The personal contact Life bought was being allowed to stretch to all contact, without question.

So we hammered for months at NASA, and they finally agreed to allow me access to the astronauts as long as it was confined to the base at Langley. So for several weeks, I hung out virtually alone with the astronauts.

It helped that I had almost as many hours in Navy aircraft as Carpenter (although none of his skills) and could talk their language.

So they got accustomed to having me underfoot. And from those weeks came a book.

The book, of course, was outdated almost before it was published. But even the ultimate moon landings — taking the leadership in space from the Russians and mostly executed by a growing cadre of new astronauts — never dimmed the luster that clung to the original seven Carpenter represented here last week.

Exchanging old memories with him after the Omega event, I remembered — but didn’t bring up — the picture of him bobbing about on the Pacific for several hours, awaiting rescue in his cramped capsule as the fourth American astronaut to orbit the earth. Several equipment failures caused him to overshoot his landing target — where ships waited to spot his parachute — by some 250 miles and initiate a rescue effort that involved a whole flotilla of ships, aircraft and medics.

All this — even the moon landings — seemed light years distant as I listened to the astronauts on the stage make the case for a revival of interest and support for new exploration in space.

It seemed symbolically directed at the kids who were invited to sit on the stage during the proceedings. They were asked if they dreamed about the impossible as the astronauts had once dreamed about the moon.

And then they were urged to dream their own impossible dreams about setting foot on Mars.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.