Col. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died last Shabbos
aboard the space shuttle Columbia, was a soft-spoken combat
pilot.
Before the Columbia's mission, and later as the shuttle
carried out its 16 days of science experiments, much of the
attention focused on Colonel Ramon. The son of a Holocaust
survivor, Colonel Ramon, 48, was the first citizen of Israel
to go into space. He felt this as a calling and he responded
to the call. "Every time you are the first, it is
meaningful," he said. "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."
He was sensitive to the symbolism of his journey and the
steps he took were widely reported. He asked for kosher food
on the shuttle, although he acknowledged that he did not
insist on it in his everyday life. He also took along wine
and a kiddush cup for Shabbos, though he did not seek
out expert halachic guidance for when he should observe
it.
On the shuttle, where he presided over an Israeli project to
collect images of dust storms to gauge their impact on
climate, Colonel Ramon also carried a small sefer
Torah used at the bar mitzvah of the dust project's
principal investigator, Dr. Joachim Joseph. The bar mitzvah
took place almost 60 years ago in a Nazi concentration camp.
The elderly rabbi who helped him, gave the Torah to the boy
and told him to tell people what had happened there. He was
niftar soon after. Dr. Joseph said Colonel Ramon saw
the Torah when visiting his home and was so moved by the
story that he asked to take it into space.
In an interview from space with Israeli officials, Ramon
displayed the Torah. "This represents more than anything the
ability of the Jewish people to survive despite everything
from horrible periods, black days, to reach periods of hope
and belief in the future," the colonel said.
Ramon also carried a credit-card sized microfiche of the
Bible given to him by Israeli President Moshe Katsav, and
some mezuzahs.
The Hebrew Yated Ne'eman wrote that "Ilan Ramon . . .
will be rememembered for his pleasant talk (sichoh
no'eh). He felt himself as a Jew, and sought to highlight
Jewish symbols in his journey. . . . In these days of
incitement against anything holy, Ramon will be remembered as
one who spoke about his Jewishness without any embarrassment,
even when he reached the pinnacle of technological
achievement."
Officials at NASA acknowledged that the presence of an
Israeli astronaut intensified the heightened security they
had imposed since Sept. 11, 2001. But Colonel Ramon and his
crewmates said they were not unduly concerned about their
safety. Colonel Ramon, who spent more than four years
preparing for the flight, saw it repeatedly postponed by
higher-priority missions and problems that periodically
grounded the shuttle fleet.
Ilan Ramon was born on June 20, 1954 in a Tel Aviv suburb
and, after graduating from high school in 1972, attended the
Israel Air Force Flight School. He became a fighter pilot and
logged more than 4,000 hours in various combat aircraft. He
was still in training during the Yom Kippur War, and his
first combat assignment was on the mission to bomb the Iraqi
Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 where he played an important
role.
In 1994 he was promoted to colonel and assigned to head the
air force's weapons development and acquisition division.
Colonel Ramon was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1997
as a result of an agreement two years earlier between
President Bill Clinton and Shimon Peres, then the Israeli
foreign minister. He and his wife, Rona, moved to Houston in
1998 so he could begin training at the Johnson Space Center.
He is also survived by four children ages 6 to 14.
The American Space Program
After the Soviet Union leaped first into space with the
orbiting of Sputnik I in 1957, American fears of losing in
the space race led to the creation of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. In the
1960s it focused on putting Americans on the moon in
fulfillment of President John F. Kennedy's bold promise to do
so, although it also launched weather and communication
satellites and achieved many other goals.
Begun in 1958 and completed in 1963, the Mercury program was
the nation's first man-in-space project, although its six
flights accomplished much more, sending up the first weather
and communications satellites, devising ways to launch and
recover spacecraft and investigating human ability to work in
space. Its accomplishments included Alan B. Shepard Jr.'s
suborbital spaceflight in 1961 and John Glenn's three- orbit
flight in 1962.
From 1964 to 1966, Gemini put astronauts into orbit for up to
two weeks, with some of them stepping outside their capsules
for spacewalks. A Ranger 7 rocket sent back close-up images
of the moon before crashing on the lunar surface in 1964. A
year later Mariner 4 flew within 6,118 miles of Mars,
providing the first close-up images, and in 1966 Surveyor 1
made America's first soft landing on the moon and transmitted
10,000 photos of the lunar surface.
In December 1968, Apollo 8, with the astronauts Frank Borman,
James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders on board, circled
the moon and, focusing a television camera on earth, sent to
worldwide television audiences the first view of the "blue
marble."
The climax was in 1969 with the Apollo 11 moon landing. On
July 20 Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. touched
down in a lander while Michael Collins orbited in a command
module. Setting foot on the surface, Armstrong told millions
of viewers it was "one small step for man, one giant leap for
mankind." Before returning to earth, the astronauts spent 21
hours on the moon, taking rocks and soil, setting up
experiments and planting an American flag.
There were other moon landings, including Apollo 15 in 1971,
the first of three longer, expedition-style missions using a
lunar rover. In 1972, Apollo 17 was the last of six moon
missions; the astronauts spent 22 hours in moon walks and
camped out for three days. In all, 12 men walked on the moon
before the Apollo program ended.
Along the way there were other achievements. In 1971, Mariner
9 became the first Mars orbiter, and over the next two years
Pioneer 11 went to Jupiter and sent back dramatic cloud-top
and polar pictures. Viking 1 landed on Mars in 1976 and
transmitted data for six years.
The $25 billion space shuttle was envisioned in the 1970s as
the successor to the successful moon-landing program. Less
expensive and ambitious than a manned mission to Mars, the
reusable shuttle was to revolutionize exotic space flight by
turning it into an inexpensive, routine event, paying its own
way by deploying and repairing satellites and selling other
space services.
But the shuttle program did not have smooth sailing. The
first flight was by the Columbia in 1981. Many problems were
hidden until the 1986 explosion of the Challenger, which
killed seven astronauts within minutes of their launch.
The Last Mission
Up until its fiery and tragic end, the mission had been a
success. Researchers from Tel Aviv University said their
Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment had gathered solid
information on the plumes of dust and other aerosol particles
blown from deserts by storms before being carried worldwide
by high winds. The particles affect rain production in
clouds, deposit minerals in the ocean and scatter sunlight
that affects global warming, the scientists said.
"The experiment has worked without a hitch," Dr. Joachim
Joseph, a principal investigator, told a briefing at the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration before the
tragedy. "We have very good data, very unique data." It is
not yet known how much of the data were transmitted to earth
and how much lost together with the spacecraft.
The entire world joined in the mourning for the six American
astronauts and the lone Israeli -- except for parts of the
Arab world. There was outright glee in areas like Iraq and
Palestine which are happy for any trouble suffered by
America. Iraqis said the loss is in punishment for what
America and Israel has done to them.
"Generally speaking, reports in the Palestinian and Arab
media has been one of schadenfreude," a Palestinian
writer told The Jerusalem Post. "You have to
understand that anything that is painful for the Americans
and the Israelis is seen by the Palestinians in particular,
and the Arabs in general, as a blessing. That's how it
is."
