Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Strong men and women

Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2003 | 9:22 a.m.

ASTRONAUTS Donald "Deke" Slayton and Alan Shepard wrote "Moonshot" nine years ago. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, wrote the book's introduction. He saw the last century being remembered for "two technological developments: atomic energy and space flight. One threatened the extinction of society, one offered a survival possibility. ..."

Space exploration has come a long way since Armstrong, Shepard and Slayton showed the world what bright and courageous people can accomplish. During the past 20 years additional advancements have been made in everything except the vehicles used in space. Nevertheless, most of us have come to expect success of each mission. Until last Saturday I could only name two of the people on the space shuttle Columbia. Pilot William McCool, whose parents teach at UNLV, and Israel's Ilan Ramon from Tel Aviv were both known to me for different reasons. Prior to Saturday I couldn't have named Rick Husband, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson and Kalpana Chawla as other crewmembers.

My neighbor had seen Columbia streak overhead early that morning. She told us what she saw and immediately I wondered what had been going on in the Columbia's cabin during those final minutes. The thoughts of Deke Slayton had stuck in my mind when reading "Moonshot." Slayton was important to me because he had been raised during the Great Depression on a farm several miles south of our farm in Wisconsin. He left the farm in 1942 to fly a B-25 bomber in combat over Europe. When that segment of World War II ended, he flew an A-26 attack bomber over Japan. Upon returning home, he used his G.I. Bill for college and later became a test pilot.

Because of a heart murmur, Slayton was kept from space, but eventually NASA allowed him to fly the Apollo-Soyuz mission during 1975. What he was thinking has remained with me and made me wonder what the Columbia astronauts were thinking as they were making their approach to Earth.

According to "Moonshot," he recalled: "His practiced eye, skilled at searching for landmarks from high above the Earth through a lifetime of flight, checked the southern shore of the lake against the sparkling lights of Duluth. Now he followed the Mississippi River winding southward, dawn reflecting off the ribbons. He looked for the confluence of the Mississippi with the Wisconsin River. There. Reflected dawn showed him clearly where they joined. Now he looked barely north to where the Mississippi widened. There was La Crosse, unmistakable with its night lights still glowing. From 140 miles high, the town of Sparta, east from La Crosse, was visible.

"Below Sparta, five miles on a map, wrapped together to the human eye from this height, the countryside flowed along hills and valleys. Deke knew this Wisconsin farmland better than any place on the planet below. A hundred and sixty acres of that land was where he had spent his boyhood years, farmland with a heart-touching similarity to his family's origins in Norway. But for more than a century, his family had lived on that land over which he sped at five miles every second. What was visible as early morning countryside, without country roads too distant to view, without any boundaries save the two rivers, without a specific marking of the Slayton family farm, he saw clearly in the memories of his mind's eye.

"Then, with a silent sigh of time, it was gone, flowing far behind the hurtling spacecraft."

Astronaut William McCool's mother, Audrey, showed us she has the same spirit as her son. "Don't give up the dream. Science is important to all of us," she told reporters. According to The Wall Street Journal, the experiments in Columbia's payload included: studies on growth of prostate cancer cells, growing flawless protein crystals, encapsulating anticancer drugs to improve their efficiency. Several dozen important experiments were conducted in this final flight.

As long as we have men and women the quality of the Columbia crew, no thought should be given to stopping these important flights. In fact, our next move should be to build new and safer shuttle vehicles for these brave people. Let's not forget that today American astronauts Don Pettit and Ken Bowersox and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Bodarin are conducting experiments on the international space station.