Profiles of 7 Astronauts Aboard Shuttle
Commander Rick Husband, 45, was an Air Force colonel from Amarillo, Texas. The former test pilot was selected as an astronaut in 1994 on his fourth try. He made up his mind as a child that that was what he was going to do with his life.
"It's been pretty much a lifelong dream and just a thrill to be able to get to actually live it out," the married father of two said in an interview before Columbia's launch, his second spaceflight.
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Pilot William McCool, 41, was a Navy commander from Lubbock, Texas. He graduated second in his 1983 class at the Naval Academy, went on to test pilot school and became an astronaut in 1996. This was the first spaceflight for McCool, who was married with three sons, ages 22, 19 and 14.
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Payload commander Michael Anderson, 43, was the son of an Air Force man and grew up on military bases. He was flying for the Air Force when NASA (news - web sites) chose him in 1994 as one of only a handful of black astronauts. He traveled to Russia's Mir space station (news - web sites) in 1998.
The lieutenant colonel, who lived in Spokane, Wash., was in charge of Columbia's dozens of science experiments.
"I take the risk because I think what we're doing is really important. If you look at this research flight and if you really take an opportunity to look at each experiment ... the potential yield that we have is really tremendous," he said.
He added: "For me, it's the fact that what I'm doing can have great consequences and great benefits for everyone, for mankind."
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Kalpana Chawla, 41, emigrated to the United States from India in 1980s and became an astronaut in 1994. At the time, she wanted to design aircraft — the space program was the furthest thing from her mind.
"That would be too far-fetched," the engineer had said. But "one thing led to another" and she was chosen as an astronaut after working at NASA's Ames Research Center and Overset Methods Inc. in Northern California.
On her only other spaceflight, in 1997, she made mistakes that sent science satellite tumbling out of control. Other astronauts had to go on spacewalk to capture it.
"I stopped thinking about it after trying to figure out what are the lessons learned, and there are so many," she said. "After I had basically sorted that out, I figured it's time to really look at the future and not at the past."
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David Brown, 46, was a Navy captain, pilot and doctor. He joined the Navy after a medical internship, then went on to fly the A-6E Intruder and F-18. He became an astronaut in 1996. Columbia's mission was his first spaceflight.
When asked in a recent interview about the risk of flying in space, Brown, who was single, said: "I made a decision that is part of my job, I would incur some real risk as a routine part of my job when I joined the Navy and started flying ... airplanes off of ships, particularly airplanes off of ships at night. And I think that was a decision that I made some years ago and the decision to go fly in space is just an extension of that.
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Laurel Clark, 41, was a diving medical officer aboard submarines and then a flight surgeon before she became an astronaut in 1996. She had been on board Columbia to help with science experiments.
"I think my family has a fairly practical and pragmatic view of this whole thing, and that's that the actual launching into space is much more dangerous than any of the other security concerns," said Clark, who lived in Racine, Wis., and was married with an 8-year-old son.
She added: "There's a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us and I choose not to stop doing those things."
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Ilan Ramon, 48, was a colonel in Israel's air force and the first Israeli in space. His mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp, and his father fought for Israel's statehood alongside grandfather. Ramon fought in Yom Kippur War 1973 and Lebanon War 1982.
He served as a fighter pilot 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, flew F-16s and F-4s. He was chosen as Israel's first astronaut in 1997, then moved to Houston the next year to train for shuttle flight.
His wife, Rona, and their four children — ages 5 to 15 — live in Tel Aviv.
Before Columbia launched, Ramon had repeatedly said he was not nervous or afraid about his safety aboard the space shuttle.
"I think the only thing that will worry me is the launch sequence and the systems and the launch, being launched on time. The tenseness is there because everybody wants to be launched on time with no failures. That's it. Once you're there, you're there," he said in a recent interview.
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NASA: http:/www.jsc.nasa.gov/bios
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