Ten years after Columbia was lost

By MARCIA DUNN

AP Aero­space Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — He was just 8 when NASA lost the space shut­tle Colum­bia and he lost his astro­naut mom.

Now, 10 years later, Iain Clark is a young man on the cusp of col­lege with a master’s rat­ing in scuba div­ing and three para­chute jumps in his new log book.

His mother, Dr. Lau­rel Clark, loved scuba and sky­div­ing. So did her flight sur­geon hus­band and Iain’s dad, Dr. Jonathan Clark, who since the Feb. 1, 2003 acci­dent, has been a cru­sader for keep­ing space crews safe.

Alto­gether, 12 chil­dren lost a par­ent aboard Colum­bia. The youngest is now 15, the old­est 32. One became a fighter pilot in Israel, just like his father, and also died trag­i­cally in a crash. The old­est son of the pilot of Colum­bia is now a Marine cap­tain with three young chil­dren of his own. The commander’s daugh­ter is a sem­i­nary student.

“It’s tough los­ing a mom, that’s for sure. I think Iain was the most affected,” said Clark, a neu­rol­o­gist. “My goal was to keep him alive. That was the plan. It was kind of dicey for a while. There was a lot of dark­ness — for him and me.”

Clark’s wife and six other astro­nauts — Com­man­der Rick Hus­band, co-pilot William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Ander­son, Dr. David Brown and Israeli Ilan Ramon — were killed in the final min­utes of their 16-day sci­en­tific research mis­sion aboard Columbia.

The space shut­tle, with a wing dam­aged dur­ing launch, ripped apart in the Texas skies while headed for a land­ing at Kennedy Space Cen­ter. NASA will remem­ber the Colum­bia dead at a pub­lic memo­r­ial ser­vice at Kennedy on Fri­day morning.

Clark, now 59 and long gone from NASA, said he turned to alco­hol in the after­math of Colum­bia. If it wasn’t for his son, he doubts he would have got­ten through it.

“He’s the great­est kid ever,” Clark said in a phone inter­view from Hous­ton with The Asso­ci­ated Press. “He cares about peo­ple. He’s kind of start­ing to get his con­fi­dence, but he’s not at all cocky.”

Iain is set to grad­u­ate this spring from a board­ing school in Ari­zona; he wants to study marine biol­ogy at a uni­ver­sity in Florida.

“His life is like about as idyl­lic as you could imag­ine, con­sid­er­ing all … he’s been through,” said Clark, who is still pro­tec­tive of Iain’s pri­vacy. He would not dis­close where Iain attends school, but he did pro­vide a few snapshots.

Mother and son were extremely close.

After the acci­dent, Iain insisted to his father: “I want to invent a time machine,” If he could go back in time, the child rea­soned, he could warn his mother about the fate await­ing her.

“He asked me why she didn’t bail out, that kind of stuff, because he knew she had been a para­chutist,” Clark recalled.

Father and son were among the astro­nauts’ fam­i­lies wait­ing at the Kennedy run­way for Colum­bia that early Sat­ur­day morn­ing. Once it was clear there had been trou­ble, the fam­i­lies were hus­tled to crew quar­ters, where they got the grim news.

Rona Ramon’s sharpest mem­ory about that fate­ful Feb. 1 is how “the joy and the long­ing” to see her hus­band return from space turned so quickly into anguish. “I just looked up at the sky and said, ‘God, bring him back to me.’ “

Her hus­band, already a heroic mil­i­tary pilot, became Israel’s first space­man on the flight.

Clark hastily came up with a plan: Dis­ap­pear with his son as soon as they got back home to Hous­ton. Grab the dog, the car and as much money as pos­si­ble. Then, “drop off the grid.”

But that didn’t hap­pen. A few years went by before father and son finally made their escape. Clark bought a house in Ari­zona, keep­ing a small apart­ment in Hous­ton as he went from work­ing for NASA at John­son Space Cen­ter, to a teach­ing job at Bay­lor Col­lege of Med­i­cine and an adviser’s posi­tion at the National Space Bio­med­ical Research Institute.

Clark won’t divulge his exact where­abouts, even now. He moves every few years. He has a girl­friend, but doesn’t see him­self remarrying.

“I don’t ever want to go through los­ing a wife again,” he explained.

Clark remains bit­ter over the “really bad peo­ple” who came after him in Hous­ton for money and favors, spurred by NASA’s $27 mil­lion set­tle­ment in 2007 with the Colum­bia families.

“There was a lot of grief. There was a lot of sor­row. There was a lot of destruc­tive behav­ior. There were a lot of peo­ple tak­ing advan­tage of you,” he said.

But Clark holds no grudges against NASA, nei­ther the agency as a whole nor the man­agers who, dur­ing the flight, dis­missed con­cerns from low-level employ­ees about the sever­ity of dam­age to Columbia’s left wing. It was gouged by a piece of insu­lat­ing foam that peeled off the fuel tank at liftoff.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Jan 31 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.