03 February 2003
Columbia's Diverse Crew Represented Different Countries and Cultures
(Four of the astronauts on their first space mission) (1130) By James Fuller Washington File Science Writer Washington - The crew that perished when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart February 1 minutes before the end of its 16-day mission included six U.S. astronauts - one of them born in India - and Israel's first astronaut - together representing different cultures and different countries of the planet they had soared above. The crew members, including four who had never before flown on a space mission, were a combination of test pilots, aerospace engineers and medical doctors. But the diversity of the crew - three white American men, a white American woman, a black American man, an Israeli national and an Indian immigrant who became a U.S. citizen - is what struck many about the tragedy. Ever since her childhood in Karnal, a small town about 130 kilometers from New Delhi, India, 41-year-old Kalpana Chawla had nursed a dream to go into space. Early in life, she set her sights on an American education. "I was interested in aerospace and flying, and the U.S. is really the best place in the world for flying," she told the University of Texas at Arlington magazine in 1998. After getting an engineering degree from Punjab Engineering College in 1982, she moved to the United States, where she attended the University of Texas, then got a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado. She became a U.S. citizen in 1990 and an astronaut in 1994. Chawla became the first Indian-born woman in space in 1997 when she flew aboard the shuttle Columbia on a mission that included research on the effects of weightlessness and on the sun's outer atmosphere. R.S. Bhatia, head of the Washington office of the Indian Space Research Organization, said Chawla had become a symbol of India's greatness, even though she was no longer a citizen. "After her first flight, she became a national hero," he said. "She is an American citizen, but she is ours too. This is the most terrible tragedy. We have lost a hero." Israel's first astronaut was Colonel Ilan Ramon. "From space, Israel looks like it does on a map; small but charming," Ramon told Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by video hookup during the Columbia space flight. The 48-year-old Ramon presided over an Israeli science project to collect images of dust storms to gauge their impact on the climate during the Columbia mission. He was chosen as Israel's first astronaut in 1997 and moved to Houston, Texas, the next year to train for the Columbia mission. "Every time you are the first, it is meaningful," Ramon said in an interview prior to the launch of Columbia on January 16. "I am told my flight is meaningful to a lot of Jewish people around the world. Being the first Israeli astronaut, I feel I am representing all Jews and all Israelis." The son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, the air force colonel and father of four carried a special keepsake with him on his journey aboard Columbia. It was a small Torah scroll that had been secretly read by Jews almost 60 years ago in one of the Nazi concentration camps. Ramon, who served as a fighter pilot in the Israeli air force before becoming an astronaut, logged more than 4,000 hours in various combat aircraft. He fought in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and in the Lebanon conflict in 1982. The commander of the Columbia mission was Rick Husband, a 45-year-old Air Force colonel who had yearned to be an astronaut from the time he was a child growing up in Amarillo, Texas. A former test pilot with more than 3,800 hours of flight time in more than 40 types of aircraft, Husband was chosen for the NASA space program in 1994 - on his fourth time applying for teh astronaut program. "It's been pretty much a lifelong dream and just a thrill to be able to get to actually live it," Husband told reporters just before the January 16 launch of Columbia. The Columbia flight was his second into space. In 1999, Husband served as pilot aboard the space shuttle Discovery in the first mission by a shuttle crew to dock with the international space station. William McCool, the pilot of the space shuttle Columbia, was a 41-year-old Navy commander from Lubbock, Texas, who even at an early age was gluing together model airplanes and wanted to follow in his father's footsteps flying for the Navy. McCool, who graduated second in his 1983 class at the Naval Academy, became an experienced Navy test pilot, logging more than 2,800 flight hours. The Columbia mission was his first trip into space. Also on her first flight into space was Laurel Salton Clark, a Navy commander and flight surgeon from Racine, Wisconsin. The 41-year-old Clark, who trained first as a pediatrician, later became a Navy undersea medical officer, serving on several submarine missions. After nearly a decade in the Navy, a friend suggested that Clark take the NASA test for astronauts. Like many others, she was not accepted on the first round. She later became part of a class known as the Sardines, because it had more than 40 astronaut candidates, the most in history. Columbia's science payload commander, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Anderson, was selected for the space program in 1994, and was one of seven African American astronauts. Anderson participated in the Shuttle-Mir docking mission in 1998, when the crew transferred over 4,000 kilograms of scientific equipment and other hardware from the shuttle Endeavor to the Mir space station. Anderson never doubted he would be an astronaut. "I never had any serious doubts about it. It was just a matter of when," he told a university newsletter in 1998. But on the eve of the Columbia flight, Anderson did talk about the risk of space flight, telling reporters, "There's always that unknown." The seventh astronaut aboard Columbia was mission specialist David Brown, a 46-year-old Navy doctor and pilot who was also on his first space flight. Brown was a star gymnast in high school, and went on to join the circus, performing as an acrobat and stilt walker, while earning a degree in biology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Brown told his parents in an e-mail from Columbia that the spaceflight left him in awe. "The views of earth are really beautiful," he wrote. "If I had been born in space, I would desire to visit the beautiful earth more than I ever yearned to visit space." (The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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