DOWN-TO-EARTH GUY
By ALAN DEUTSCHMAN

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Now that William Anders has been picked as the next CEO of General Dynamics, the rank-and-file at the St. Louis defense contractor might be wondering what he was like as an astronaut. Was this former test pilot one of those rambunctious pranksters celebrated in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff? No way. When Time named the Apollo 8 crewmates as 1968's Men of the Year for making the first manned orbit of the moon, it described them as ''deadly serious men,'' who seemed ''as staid and businesslike as a group of corporate executives.'' That's exactly what they became: Frank Borman rose to the top job at Eastern Air Lines, and James Lovell is an executive vice president at Centel, a telecommunications company. If General Dynamics' directors wanted a straight arrow to keep fraud and scandal from creeping back into the company, they couldn't have chosen better. Schooled in electrical engineering at the Naval Academy, the soft-spoken Anders, 56, ran the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before orbiting through GE and Textron. A father of six, he likes to fly helicopters and go scuba diving, skills he picked up in astronaut training. Used to getting around in a 206L LongRanger copter made by Textron's Bell unit, Anders says he wouldn't mind switching to a General Dynamics F-16 fighter. Alas, that would surely prove too expensive a perk now that cost reduction is the byword among defense contractors. Says Anders of the industry's prospects: ''It's going to be a shrinking market.'' Keeping up investment in R&D for the long run will require ''guts and fortitude,'' he says. Or the corporate version of the right stuff.