More astronauts have studied at Naval Postgraduate School than any other institution, including the last man to walk on the moon, Capt. Gene Cernan, and one of the most recent people in space – in fact, if you’re reading this on May 21, Commander Scott Altman, NPS class of 1990, and his crew are still in orbit working on repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope from the dock of the space shuttle Atlantis.

The school’s high-level curriculum, echoed by the Latin motto Praestantia Per Scientiam (“excellence through Knowledge”), has forged a legion of leaders in military, civilian and government spheres, including the “father” of the Aegis ballistic missile defense system, retired Rear Admiral Wayne E. Meyer; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen; and current Department of Oceanography professor Wieslaw Maslowski, who has worked with NOAA, NASA and, most visibly, Al Gore, on global climate change in the Arctic.

“What’s done here,” NPS spokesman Alan Richmond says, “can’t be duplicated anywhere else in the world.”

This weekend the Naval Postgraduate School celebrates its 100th year with a slate of private events for current and former students, faculty and staff that culminate on Memorial Day with public events including open house tours of the Dudley Knox Library, space systems and more (10-11:30am), tours of the former Hotel Del Monte, now named Herrmann Hall (10:30am-2:30pm), a performance by the DLI Choir (11-11:30am) and a concert on the lawn by the Monterey Bay Symphony (2-3:30pm).

The public segment also includes a series of lectures, backdropped by an exhibit at the Monterey Maritime and History Museum (11am and 2pm Sat, 2pm Sun; 5 Custom House Plaza, Monterey), Hidden History: Untold Stories of the Naval Postgraduate School, curated by NPS historian John Sanders.

Expected to draw as many as 8,000 people, the Memorial Day event represents the most open and civilian-friendly day on the campus since the post-9/11 security tightening, and signals the start of a year-long schedule of centennial events that will stretch until Memorial Day 2010. This weekend also unveils the NPS Centennial Timeline, made up of about 50 4-foot-by-7-foot framed panels that tell the school’s 100-year story with neatly assembled collages of archival photos, text, captions and its own running timeline. It’s an ambitious and accessible walk through NPS history.

That history starts June 9, 1909, when then-Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer signed General Order No. 27, establishing the School of Marine Engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland well before WWI, the United Nations and women’s suffrage. It followed in the footsteps of its 1884 Rhode Island counterpart, the U.S. Naval War College, which bears the broad mission as “a place of original research on all questions relating to war and to statesmanship connected with war, or the prevention of war.”

After an aborted attempt to move the school to UC Berkeley or to close it down completely, World War II swelled the ranks of its students, then deflated those numbers as those students joined the various theaters of battle. In 1943 the Navy requisitioned Hotel Del Monte as an aviation training facility (it later paid for it) and in 1951 moved the school to Monterey, with the former hotel as the hub of its growing operations. (An amusing early recruiting poster touts pictures of a sailboat in the bay, the Lone Cypress, men golfing and the resort-looking hotel, with the tagline: “Think it over!”)

Today, a full 248 tenure-track and tenured faculty, all with doctorates, teach at four schools: Business and Public Policy, Engineering and Applied Sciences, International Graduate Studies, and Operational and Information Systems (this one’s got the cool flight simulator). Its standard-size 2009 student body of 2,177 is majority Navy (41 percent), but the next largest segment are DOD-cleared civilians (26 percent), with the rest made up of Army, Marine, Air Force and International students from 60 countries.

Though “tightened security” has restricted civilian access to the campus – a shame, as it once served as a scenic diversion chocked with pines, firs, oaks, eucalyptus and palms, appointed with the stately Hotel Del Monte and the pastoral Del Monte Lake, which is used to water the campus greenery, and roamed by wild peacocks – it has sought outreach and exchange in other ways.

Earlier this month, NPS reprised its annual International Day festivities in which students from 24 coutries, including Germany, Singapore, Korea, Turkey, Israel, Nigeria and Bosnia-Herzogovina, played host ambassadors to throngs of civilians at decorated tables, dishing out native food and treats (and travel brochures) while dressed in traditional clothes and genially sharing their cultures. NPS also partners with local institutions like Moss Landing Marine Labs, the Monterey Institute of International Studies, CSU Monterey Bay and legions of others.

Were it not for friendly outreach efforts like these, the school’s proximity to the ears of military and foreign policy leaders, its secretive work in weapons research and its discreet local profile (“It’s more in the news nationally – BBC, ABC, NBC, the New York Times – than it is locally,” says Richmond) might conjure unsettling scenes from the War Room of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. But fact is more banal than fiction. And more reassuring. The school is surprisingly open to arguments against war and military diplomacy, as evidenced by NPS associate professor of economics and Hoover Institution fellow David R. Henderson, who in a lecture before admirals in June 2002 “made the case against war on Iraq,” he writes in an October 2007 jpost on antiwar.com. “Virtually all of those who expressed any thoughts on the issue agreed with me.” That kind of open arena speaks to an environment that is not dogmatic, but pragmatic.

“We’re not just weapons systems,” Richmond says. “It’s education, it’s future leaders, it’s oceanography, it’s alternative ways to [achieve] conflict resolution – not just war.”

In part because its identity is so multi-faceted and its scope so broad, the steadfast and storied institution behind the gates is easy to lose track of. “People confuse us with DLI,” Richmond concedes.

It is also a military base. The presence of armed Marines, accompanied by German shepherds, reminds visitors of that fact. But on one sunny afternoon, after a young soldier at a guard station checked the ID and credentials of a visitor with an appointment, he waved the visitor through with a subtle dance while singing to himself, “You, shook me aaaall niiight looong… ”

For all its singularity, it is still a school.

The NPS Memorial Day and Centennial Celebration takes place 9am-3:30pm Monday at the Naval Postgraduate School, 1 University Circle, Monterey. Free. 656-2441, 656-3649, www.nps.edu.