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CAPE CANAVERAL Families' expectancy turns to sorrow Bereaved say kin embraced mission By Bob Hohler, Globe Staff, 2/2/2003
Four days earlier, they had paused with much of the nation on the 17th anniversary of the Challenger disaster to honor all those who had died in the pursuit of space flight, including Christa McAuliffe, the Concord, N.H., schoolteacher, and her six Challenger crewmates. But since NASA had completed 87 manned space flights since the Challenger catastrophe on Jan. 28, 1986, the Columbia families, including the wife and children of Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, had little reason to fear the worst as their loved ones descended toward Earth, little more than 16 minutes from their scheduled landing. They had no way of knowing that NASA's Mission Control had lost communication with the shuttle as it flew about 40 miles above New Mexico at more than eight times the speed of sound. ''Many of us were standing alongside the runway waiting to celebrate their triumphant return,'' said Bill Readdy, NASA's associate administrator of space flight.
But as they stood watch at a sprawling complex that for decades has served as launching pad for some of the greatest glories and tragedies of the space age, the families of the Columbia crew witnessed only an empty sky as they became the latest members of a small fraternity of sorrow: widows, widowers and orphans of fallen explorers. Word soon arrived that the ship had disintegrated on reentry, and the families quickly were whisked away. ''We all grieve for them,'' Readdy said. ''We all pray with them for the crew.'' In a vast government building at the space center where other mourning families have gathered in grief, relatives of the Columbia crew received condolences by telephone from President Bush before they were flown on NASA aircraft back to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where many crew members lived and all of them trained for their final flight. The flag at the landmark countdown clock at Kennedy Space Center was lowered to half-staff soon after they departed. ''Certainly, the families of all of them we have assured we will do everything, everything we can possibly do to guarantee that they work their way through this horrific tragedy,'' said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe. Lost aboard Columbia were Ramon, six American astronauts - Michael Anderson, David M. Brown, Laurel Clark, Rick Husband, William C. McCool, and Kalpana Chawla, the first woman native of India to fly on a US space shuttle. Sixteen days earlier, a crowd of more than 300 had jammed the VIP viewing area at the Kennedy Space Center to hail their departure. Because space flight had seemed to become so routine again, given the 17 years of safety since the Challenger tragedy, NASA recently had renewed its program to send teachers aloft, starting with McAuliffe's backup, Barbara Morgan, a former grade-school teacher from Idaho, who was due to fly to the international space station in November. And crowds for shuttle launches had grown relatively scant. But Ramon's presence on the flight had made Columbia's mission one of the most celebrated in recent years. A colonel and star combat pilot in the Israeli Air Force, Ramon, 48, was the son of a Holocaust survivor and the pride of his homeland for his historic flight into space. He died with several special mementoes, including a small Torah scroll that belonged to a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp and a pencil drawing titled ''Moon Landscape'' by a boy who died at the Auschwitz camp. Most of the 300 VIPs who witnessed the shuttle's launch had ties to Ramon. As his wife and four children returned last night to their temporary home near Houston, Ramon, like his crewmates, was mourned by millions who never knew him. Nearly 1,000 tourists and residents of Florida's Space Coast gathered at the Astronaut Memorial at Kennedy Space Center for a moment of silence. The memorial is a black granite wall etched with the names of those who have died in the space age. ''We've all hoped and prayed many times that no names would be added to this wall,'' said Stephen Feldman, president of the Astronaut Memorial Foundation. NASA suspended future flights, including Morgan's, as the agency began to recover the shuttle's remnants that scattered over a wide swath of Texas to wage an exhaustive investigation into the accident. The families, in their grief, left NASA officials with a clear message. ''They said that we must find what happened and fix it and move on,'' Readdy said. ''We can't let their sacrifice be in vain.''
This story ran on page A24 of the Boston Globe on 2/2/2003.
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APE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Soon, they planned to celebrate. Tingling with pride, joy, and the anxiety that naturally accompanies the last critical stage of a mission fraught with risk, the families of the seven crew members aboard the space shuttle Columbia yesterday gathered next to a runway at the Kennedy Space Center to turn their eyes toward the pastel blue Florida sky.
