A Flight into History

On Saturday morning, February 1, 2003, as the space shuttle Columbia streaked across the beautiful, sunny-blue skies over Texas, with less than 16 minutes left in its 16-day mission, something went terribly wrong.

As stunned onlookers on the ground looked skyward, the spacecraft began to break apart right before their eyes. Then, seemingly in slow motion, the once majestic ship fell to earth in pieces, leaving in its wake a trail of smoke as a haunting reminder of what had just occurred.

In an instant, seven brave, heroic, incredible, people were gone.

Sometimes the lives of history’s heroes end in tragedy. However, sometimes history’s perspective does not tell the entire story.

While the history books will explain how Columbia’s seven astronauts died in a tragic accident, those books probably will not tell the more important story.

The story of how each one of those seven astronauts had achieved their dream of flying into space, one of the last remaining frontiers of human existence, and how they probably would not change a thing if they had to do it all over again.

During the days following the tragedy, their fellow astronauts were asked if they would ever want to fly in a space shuttle again. To a person, each one said, yes, that after NASA determined what went wrong and fixed the problem, they would be happy to fly again.

While no one can speak for the seven astronauts that died on Saturday, based on their life stories, there’s an excellent chance that they would say yes as well.

* Columbia Commander Rick Husband, 45, was making his second flight into space. His first foray came in 1999 aboard the space shuttle Discovery, which was the shuttle that first docked with the International Space Station.

He was a U.S. Air Force colonel and had logged more than 3,800 hours in many different aircraft. He grew up in Texas and joined the service right after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering from Texas Tech University in 1980. He also earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Fresno State.

According to a family friend, Husband wanted to be an astronaut from the time he was in fourth grade, and he worked and did whatever it took until he achieved his goal.

On space flight, he said in an interview that: “It’s been pretty much a life long dream and just a thrill to be able to get to actually live it out.”

Husband leaves behind a wife, Evelyn, and two children.

* Shuttle Pilot Commander William McCool, 40, was making his first flight into space. A US Navy commander and Naval Academy graduate, McCool considered getting the chance to go into space a great experience.

“There is so much more than what I ever expected,” he had said in an interview during the mission. “It’s beyond imagination, until you actually get up and see it and experience it and feel it.”

McCool graduated second in his class at the Naval Academy in 1983. He holds three science degrees: a bachelor of science degree in applied science from the US Naval Academy (1983), a master of science degree in computer science from the University of Maryland (1985) and a master of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the US Naval Postgraduate School (1992). He served aboard the USS Coral Sea and USS Enterprise and had logged over 2,800 hours of flight time.

He leaves behind a wife, Lani, and three children.

* Payload Commander Michael Anderson, 42, one of the few but growing number of African-American astronauts in NASA, was flying into space for the second time in his career. His first flight was in 1998 aboard space shuttle Endeavour, which performed the eighth docking between the Shuttle and the Russian Mir space station.

According to his sister, becoming an astronaut was what her brother dreamed of doing most of his life and he sacrificed to reach his goal.

On why he accepted the risk of space flight, Anderson said in an interview, “I take the risk because I think what we’re doing is really important. For me it’s the fact that what I’m doing can have great consequences and great benefits for everyone, for mankind.”

Anderson was born in New York, but called Spokane, Washington home. He graduated with a degree in physics/astronomy from the University of Washington in 1981, then received a masters of science degree in physics from Creighton University in 1990.

The US Air Force Lt. Colonel leaves behind a wife, Sandra Hawkins, and two children.

* Columbia Pilot/Mission Specialist David Brown, 46, was making his maiden voyage into space.

A US Navy captain, Brown was a flight surgeon. He received his medical training at Eastern Virginia Medical School and the Medical University of South Carolina. He was also a pilot and had logged more than 2,700 hours during his career.

“He loved space and couldn’t get enough,” his father had said in an interview about his son and his opportunity to travel into space.

On the risk of space flight, Brown had said in an interview, “I made a decision that is part of my job, I would incur some real risk as a routine part of my job when I joined the Navy and started flying … airplanes off of ships, particularly off of ships at night. And I think that was a decision that I made some years ago and the decision to go fly in space is just an extension of that.

Brown was single.

* Columbia Engineer/Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla, 41, was flying on a space shuttle for the second time. Her first flight was in 1997 aboard Columbia, where she became the first Indian woman to fly into space.

Born in India near New Delhi, she came to the United States in the early 1980s and earned a master of science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas in 1984, and a doctorate of philosophy in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado in 1988.

She had wanted to design aircraft and the space program was the farthest thing from her mind. “That would be too far fetched,” she had said. But, things would change.

In 1988, she began working at the NASA Ames Research Center and in 1995 she became an astronaut candidate.

After her first space flight, she told of her experience to a paper in India. “The Ganges Valley looked majestic, mind boggling,” she said. “Africa looked like a desert and the Nile a vein in it.”

As that first shuttle kept passing over India, especially New Delhi, she would excitedly point it out to her fellow crew members and tell them, “I lived near there.”

Chawla also was a pilot, earning a Certified Flight Instructor’s license for airplanes and gliders, and commercial pilot’s licenses for single- and multi-engine land and seaplanes. She told newspapers that her inspiration for flying was J.R.D. Tata, who flew the first mail flights in India.

In a 1988 interview with an Indian newspaper, several years before she would become an astronaut candidate, Chawla spoke about space and what it meant to her, philosophically speaking.

“When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system,” she had said.

Chawla leaves behind a husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison.

* Columbia Physician/Mission Specialist Laurel Blair Salton Clark, 41, was making her first flight into space.

She was a US Navy Commander and flight surgeon, earning a doctorate in medicine from the University of Wisconsin in 1987. Upon graduation she joined the Navy and did postgraduate medical education in Pediatrics from 1987-1988 at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.

After much training, she also served as a Naval Submarine Medical Officer, Diving Medical Officer and Flight Surgeon during her successful Naval career, which saw her receive numerous commendations.

She was selected by NASA in 1996 and after two years of training and evaluation, she qualified for flight assignment as a mission specialist.

During the Columbia flight, Clark was in charge of a number of scientific experiments. In an interview during the flight, she said that it was the wonder of life that inspired her most during the trip. She made particular note of a silkworm cocoon that she had seen hatch during the flight.

“There was a moth in there, and it still had its wings crumpled up and it was just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lot of places and life is a magical thing,” she said.

Her family had some fears about her job, but she tried to make them understand. “To me there’s a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us and I choose not to stop doing those things. They’ve (my family) all come to accept that it’s what I want to do.”

The day before Columbia was scheduled to return home, her brother, Daniel Salton, received an email from Clark, and while he was grieving for his sister, he also was happy that she had achieved her dream. He told reporters, “She loved it (space flight),” he said. “I’m glad she got to get up to space and got to see it, because that had been a dream for a long time.”

Another relative also received an email from Clark the day before Columbia was going to return. In the email, Clark had told about all of the photos she had taken during the flight and how much she was looking forward to showing them to her family and friends.”

In an interview she gave in 2001, Clark said that if, and when, she got the chance to go up into space, “The one thing that I’m looking forward to the most is being able to look down on the Earth from that height. To see our entire planet Earth as one living unit.”

For 16 days, she was able to do just that.

Clark leaves behind a husband, Jonathan B. Clark, and a child.

* Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, 48, came to his first space flight in a round about way. He was the first Israeli astronaut to represent his nation and go into space.

A highly decorated colonel and Air Force fighter pilot, Ramon saw combat experience in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Lebanon War in 1982 and he participated in the attack on an Iraqi nuclear power plant in 1981.

When you study Ramon’s background, you can easily find where he got the strength and determination that had driven him to accomplish all that he had in his life. His mother and grandmother were survivors of the Auschwitz death camp, and his father and grandfather fought for in the war for Israel’s independence.

Space flight was beyond a dream for Ramon, because Israel does not have a space program. But in 1997, he was chosen to become Israel’s first astronaut, and when that opportunity was presented to him, he jumped at it. He packed up his family and moved half-way around the world to Houston, Texas, to begin his training.

In an interview, he told reporters, “Space is inspiring. And when you talk about it, everybody, kids, even us (astronauts), are excited about it.”

As for the risk of space flight, Ramon said in another interview, “I think the only think that will worry me is the launch sequence and the systems and the launch (itself), being launched on time. The tenseness is there because everybody wants to be launched on time with no failures. That’s it. Once you’re there, you’re there.”

Ramon leaves behind a wife, Rona, and four children.

While they are all gone now and while our nation mourns for them, we also should celebrate their lives. They had accomplished their dream. A dream so strong, that these seven people, and for that matter, all astronauts, present, past and future, would do anything, risk everything, including their lives, to be able to climb aboard a space ship and fly up to the stars. Such is the power of the dream of space flight.

That is why on Thursday, January, 16, 2003, a beautiful, sunny morning a few weeks ago, these seven brave, heroic astronauts strolled out onto the tarmac at Cape Canaveral, smiling and waving to their family, friends and onlookers. They were happy and excited at what they were about to do.

In front of them, standing majestically against the bright, blue, Florida sky awaited their destiny – the Space Shuttle Columbia, their chariot to the stars.

They walked onward, each of them about to achieve their dream of flying into space. Each of them to fulfill their destiny.

They boarded their spacecraft and lifted off towards the heavens, where together, forever, they flew into history.