David Low, 52, astronaut on 3 shuttle missions
WASHINGTON - David Low, a NASA astronaut who served on three space shuttle missions before becoming a space industry executive, died Saturday of colon cancer at suburban Reston (Va.) Hospital Center.
During his 12 years as an astronaut, he logged more than 714 hours in space while circling the Earth more than 540 times. He was 52.
In June 1993, Mr. Low was payload commander aboard the Endeavor, launched to recover the free-flying European Retrievable Carrier. Four days into the mission, his third spaceflight, Mr. Low and fellow astronaut Peter "Jeff" Wisoff ventured outside the spacecraft, where they worked for five hours and 50 minutes.
Frank Culbertson, a fellow astronaut and good friend who also walked in space, said he knew what Mr. Low must have been feeling as he left the "cozy comfort" of the Endeavor and stepped into the vacuum of space.
"You have butterflies," he said. "You make sure that everything you do, you do very carefully."
Mr. Low was almost fanatically well prepared, Culbertson said. "He would study something to death before he got involved."
On his first flight into space, an 11-day mission aboard the space shuttle Columbia three years earlier, Mr. Low carried with him a pair of 159-year-old socks that had belonged to Ezra Cornell, founder of the university that bears his name. Mr. Low had received a degree at Cornell.
The rookie crew member had a legacy to uphold. His father, George, had been a NASA director who was the first to suggest to President John F. Kennedy in 1960 that an astronaut could walk on the moon within the decade. The elder Low, who died in 1984, also directed the Gemini and Apollo missions.
"He's still the yardstick that I use to measure most things in life," Mr. Low said in a 1990 interview, "from how you handle yourself to how you treat other people."
George David Low was born in Cleveland and, as a sister recalled, declared to family members at age 9 that he would be an astronaut.
He received a bachelor's degree in physics and engineering from Washington and Lee University in 1978, a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 1980, and a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in 1983.
From 1980 to 1984, he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where he was involved in planning several planetary space probes. He also helped with the systems engineering design of the Galileo probe, a $1.4 billion spacecraft launched from the shuttle Atlantis in 1990.
He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1984 and at 28 was the youngest in his class. He worked on the shuttle's robot arm system and on plans for future spacewalks. He also served as the spacecraft communicator, or capcom, for three shuttle missions, including the first flight after the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
"He was more academic than the rest of us," Culbertson recalled, "but he also became a very good operator."
On his first spaceflight, the one with the antique socks stowed aboard, he helped retrieve a science satellite called the Long Duration Exposure Facility. The 10 1/2-ton satellite, the size of a school bus, was in danger of plunging to a fiery destruction, taking with it six years of valuable scientific information from nearly 57 experiments.
On his second flight, in 1991, Mr. Low helped to launch the fifth Tracking and Data Relay Satellite and conduct more than 30 experiments related to plans for the future space station.
He worked for NASA for three years after his last flight. He helped work out changes between Space Station Freedom and the international space station programs.
He leaves his wife of 15 years, JoAnn Andochick Low of Sterling, Va.; three children, Maggie, Christopher, and Abigail, all of Sterling; his mother, Mary of Bethesda, Md.; two brothers, Mark of Woodinville, Wash., and John of Rockville, Md.; and two sisters, Diane Low Murphy of Bethesda and Nancy Low Sullivan of Rye, N.Y.
