Dale K. Robinson
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| Rick Husband |
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| William McCool |
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| Michael Anderson |
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| Kalpana Chawla |
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| David Brown |
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| Laurel Clark |
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| Ilan Ramon |
February 1, 2003
They strap on a blowtorch and ride it into the sky and beyond to the void of space. Men and women challenging “The Final Frontier.” Brave men and women with a foothold on the future, and courage for the unexpected.
The astronauts’ names aren’t known today like they were forty years ago when men like Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom and John Glenn took those first tentative steps into space. I was nine years old when Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 blasted into space on May 5, 1961. For me, the world stopped as he made his short flight to the edge of space and back. A television was rolled into our classroom and we watched the launch. We waited nervously as Walter Cronkite reported on Shepard’s progress. We cheered when the capsule’s parachutes were spotted and again when Shepard was plucked safely from the sea.
We held our breath a few months later as Gus Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 sank to the ocean floor after a successful sub-orbital flight. And in February 1962, we cheered once more as John Glenn made history, orbiting earth in Friendship 7. Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper followed over the next year with ever more daring missions. And I was glued to the TV, devouring every launch, hanging on every word Walter Cronkite had to say, swelling with pride when we watched the helicopters drop divers alongside the bobbing capsules to lift the hero and his spacecraft to safety aboard a waiting aircraft carrier. One of my favorite toys of the time was a Sea King helicopter that included a Mercury capsule. (Would that I had that toy today!)
Over the years that followed, with the Gemini program and the Apollo program, the launches became routine, interspersed with moments of great import. In 1967, three astronauts died on the launch pad when fire broke out in Apollo 1. In 1968, Apollo 8 took man to orbit the moon for the first time. In 1969, Apollo 11 made history when Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. In April 1970, the world held its collective breath once more when disaster struck Apollo 13. Although the mission was aborted, the three astronauts returned safely. The remainder of the Apollo program was hardly notable.
In 1981, the Space Shuttle debuted as Columbia made her first flight. By January 1986, shuttle flights were routine. And then Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. Two years later, shuttle flights resumed and soon became routine again.
In 1961, the world stopped when an American astronaut blasted into space. His name was a household word. Forty-two years later, a shuttle launch is a 30-second sound byte on the news. It takes a tragedy like the Challenger explosion or today’s destruction of Columbia to get the same coverage we gave to heroes like Shepard, Grissom, Glenn or Armstrong.
But make no mistake – the astronauts aboard Columbia were heroes.
Commander Rick Husband, 45, an Air Force colonel from Amarillo, Texas. On his second space flight, he was fulfilling a lifelong dream. He left behind a wife and two children.
Pilot William McCool, 41, a Navy commander from Lubbock, Texas. Selected for astronaut training in 1996, this was his first flight. He was married with three sons, ages 22, 19 and 14.
Payload commander Michael Anderson, 43, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, grew up on military bases as an Air Force brat. Selected by NASA in 1994, he was only one of only a handful of black astronauts.
Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla, 41, became an astronaut in 1994. She immigrated to the United States from India in the 1980s. She was trained as an engineer and had no thoughts of going into space. “That would be too far-fetched,” the aircraft designer had said. But she was chosen as an astronaut after working at NASA's Ames Research Center and Overset Methods Inc. in Northern California. This was her second space flight.
Dr. David Brown, 46, was a Navy captain. After completing a medical internship, he joined the US Navy, where he went on to fly the A-6E Intruder and F-18 Hornet. As a navy pilot, risk was a way of life. “I made a decision that is part of my job,” he told an interviewer. “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 airplanes 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.” NASA tapped him for astronaut training in 1996. He was single.
Dr. Laurel Clark, 41 and from Racine, Wis., became an astronaut in 1996. She had served in the Navy as a diving medical officer aboard submarines and then as flight surgeon. “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, ” she said. “I think my family has a fairly practical and pragmatic view of this whole thing, and that's that the actual launching into space is much more dangerous than any of the other security concerns.” Clark was married with an 8-year-old son.
Israeli Air Force Colonel Ilan Ramon, 48, was the first Israeli in space. He was a fighter pilot with combat experience in the 1973 Yon Kippur War and the Lebanon War in 1982. Married and the father of four, his own mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp. He repeatedly told the press he was not concerned about his safety aboard the space shuttle. “I think the only thing that will worry me is the launch sequence and the systems and the launch, 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.”
These seven men and women were heroes, everyone, men and women who went boldly where few had gone before. In a poem in his 1957 book “The Airman’s World,” aviation writer and pioneer Gill Robb Wilson wrote “Not since time began has civilization been so challenged in mind and spirit to exhaust the potential of the physical universe as in the air age. Nor is this challenge one of easy accomplishment. A heart for the unknown, a courage for the unexpected, and a will to see over the next hill – these are the essential equipment of the airman. Yet the rewards are unparalleled …”
Certainly the crew of Columbia had a heart for the unknown, courage, and the will to see over the next hill. Godspeed, Columbia.