COLUMBIA LOST
Columbia crew was a portrait of unity

By Jerry Schwartz
Associated Press

There was so much to divide them: gender (five men, two women), background (their number included an Israeli, a black man, an Indian immigrant), experience (three veterans of spaceflight, four rookies).

The seven Columbia astronauts wave to a television camera in this Jan. 20 photo. The crew members were an especially close-knit group despite their diverse backgrounds. All were killed in the crash. NASA via Associated Press

But Columbia's crew was united — and not just in its mission. Their camaraderie was extraordinary, even in the tight-knit world of space exploration.

"I couldn't be happier with the people I've got on my crew," Mission Commander Rick D. Husband said in an interview before takeoff. "We all have had a tremendous time and so they have made it very easy for me, and for that I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude, as well."

It showed — in the easy way in which they related to each other, and in their shared wonderment at the beautiful planet they orbited.

How did this crew become an orbiting family?

Perhaps it happened in the many months of delays that preceded the launch, as the Columbia was overhauled and as training was prolonged for the crew of STS-107. Perhaps it happened in August, when they trekked eastward though Wyoming's Wind River Mountains, crossing the Continental Divide.

The packs were heavy — 50 or 60 pounds — the tents were small, hygiene was limited. By the end, Husband said, they knew each other "very, very well."

Perhaps it had something to do with their spirituality. Both Husband and his pilot, William McCool, were devout Christians. Though Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon was a more secular Jew, he had hoped to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath the night before landing; whether he did might never be known.

Perhaps it was a function of the mission itself. This was a flight of pure science — not engineering, not construction

"It's really the dream flight," said Michael P. Anderson, the Air Force lieutenant colonel who was one of the few blacks among NASA's astronauts.

And so, with gusto, they attacked a full roster of 80 experiments. First the red team — Husband, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon; then the blue team — Anderson, McCool and David Brown.

They watched a rose bloom in orbit ("magical," said Clark) and experimented with small flames. They photographed sandstorms from space, studied how low gravity affects antibiotics, kept tabs on a menagerie of laboratory animals (spiders, ants, silkworms, mealworms, carpenter bees, rats).

Again and again, they submitted to blood and urine tests — cheerfully.

"Science-wise, the flight's been absolutely fantastic," said Anderson, as the mission entered its last days.

You could hear the excitement in his voice: "We had a flame ball burning for over 1 1/2 hours, which is just a new world record and just something that we really didn't expect to see. We've also got a very large cancer cell growing back there that's probably 100 times larger than we could have predicted, and it will go a long way in the area of prostate cancer research."

Clark, in an e-mail message from space to friends and family, said she felt "blessed to be here representing our country and carrying out the research of scientists around the world."

But the thrill of being there, above the world, trumped it all.

"Every orbit we go over a slightly different part of the Earth," she wrote. "Of course, much of the time I'm working ... and don't see any of it. Whenever I do get to look out, it is glorious. Even the stars have a special brightness."

Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived Auschwitz, looked out at a serene globe and reflected on the unseen violence below. "The world looks marvelous from up here, so peaceful, so wonderful and so fragile," he said.

"There is so much more than what I ever expected," McCool told National Public Radio on Jan. 30. "It's beyond imagination, until you actually get up and see it and experience it and feel it."

There was time for silliness — crew members took sides on the Super Bowl. The California-bred McCool favored the Oakland Raiders, and Brown supported the Tampa Bay Buccaneers because Columbia launched from Florida.

"There are a heck of a lot of people who worked really hard from that state to get us up here and so I'm going to go for Tampa," Brown said, smiling.

And there were moments of wistfulness. There was a ceremony — chilling, in retrospect — to mark the anniversaries of the Challenger disaster and of the deaths of three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launchpad inferno.

Their sacrifice, said Husband, motivated "people around the world to achieve great things and service to others."

That these astronauts were among those so inspired was left unsaid. That their esprit was built on that shared sense of purpose was assumed.

That all of this was risky — that the crew was in danger every moment, and could only survive as a team — was a given.

Brown once spent a summer working for a traveling circus. He was an acrobat; he walked on stilts, rode a 7-foot unicycle.

From that experience, he said, he took away important lessons in teamwork, in safety, in keeping focused "even at the end of a long day when you're tired and you're doing some things that may have some risk to them," he said.

But in space, the only rings encircle Saturn. And in space, there is no net.