From the time he was a young boy, Rick Husband dreamed of becoming an astronaut. While he was still in grade school, he was hooked whenever he saw live footage of the Mercury astronauts being launched into space. Other kids used to laugh at him when he talked about his dream. Astronauts just seemed larger … [Read more…]
January 16, 2003 looked like a beautiful day for the launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia. The crew was a diverse group of people who had been preparing for years for this day. Everything looked good to go and NASA gave itself a premature pat on the back for another on-time launch. Some more cautious … [Read more…]
Long before William McCool became a Space Shuttle astronaut, he had earned a reputation for being competitive. Attending high school in the 1970s, he was part of the track team and liked running so much that he often ran to the local library to study. At least one classmate recalled that McCool wasn’t very good … [Read more…]
Born in 1959, Michael Anderson never doubted that he would become an astronaut. The Space Race was in full swing and he grew up watching shows like “Star Trek,” which included fictional role models like Lieutenant Uhura. Real-life heroes included his father, who was an Air Force officer. He also watched the first moon landing … [Read more…]
Like most people of her generation, Laurel S. Clark recalled watching the Moon landings as a little girl. She never gave much thought to becoming an astronaut while growing up. She was more interested in wildlife, and anyway, all American astronauts were men at that time. Those fuzzy images of astronauts working on the Moon … [Read more…]
At the age of three years old, a young lady was preparing to attend school in Karnal, India, when she chose the formal name of “Kalpana”, meaning “imagination”, from three possible choices. She had been born on March 17, 1962, but this ambitious girl insisted on lying about her age so she could enroll in … [Read more…]
David Brown didn’t always dream of becoming an astronaut. Growing up, he thought going into space was for larger-than-life people like John Glenn or Neil Armstrong. “I thought they were movie stars,” he said of it, and he just figured that becoming one of them was out of reach for a normal kid like him. … [Read more…]
On the morning of January 16, 2003, Ilan Ramon waited for the countdown to reach zero. Columbia was the first space shuttle to have ever flown and Ramon was Israel’s first astronaut. It was a cold morning but that didn’t stop the usual crowd from gathering to watch this launch. The moment finally arrived and … [Read more…]