Home >  Nation & World >  U.S. News

Sunday, February 02, 2003

By Dennis B. Roddy, Anita Srikameswaran and Bill Heltzel, Post-Gazette Staff Writers

They were, the five of them, going through the rituals of life in Western Pennsylvania yesterday when, 39 miles above the earth, Columbia dissolved, wrenching their minds into space and their hearts into the depths.

	Four-flight shuttle veteran Jay Apt reckons his friends had two seconds to realize something had gone terribly wrong. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette photos) In Memoriam Share your thoughts, reflections and condolences concerning the loss of the Columbia shuttle crew at a special guest book online.

One was a retired astronaut. One a teacher who almost went to space. Another a mortgage broker whose old neighbor from Israel was riding the shuttle. Still another was a scientist who explores ways to get robots to work together on other planets. The fifth a director at the Pittsburgh Opera.

In the few seconds it took a spacecraft to come apart at 18 times the speed of sound, friendships ended and resolve stiffened for people consigned by fate or duty to believe in something bigger than themselves: worlds we haven't yet seen.

Jay Apt

Jay Apt was in front of a computer screen at his Squirrel Hill home, following on the Internet what his cable system didn't provide: live coverage of the shuttle Columbia landing with four of his friends aboard.

Apt had shared an office with Rick Husband. Kalpana Chalwa -- "I only ever called her K.C." -- was part of the ground crew for Apt's fourth shuttle mission. Mike Anderson and Laurel Clark were old colleagues. When the shuttle vanished from the screens, Apt spoke with his daughter, put on a suit, attached his NASA flight pin and drove to his office at Carnegie Mellon University.

Four times Apt had flown into orbit aboard a shuttle. He had gone two times each aboard Endeavor and Atlantis. He had walked in space. In all, he had resided 35 days of his life in orbit. Slightly built, graying, bespectacled, the 53-year-old Apt deliberated on the day's events with a scientific cool. And yet, he had lost four friends and could have died the same way. It had to be the scientist in him.

"No, it's the pilot in me," he said.

He had buried friends before. He was close to Judith Resnik, lost aboard the Challenger, 17 years ago. Fellow pilots had crashed. When something goes wrong on a flight, the urge to set things aright kicks in.

He would reckon with the personal loss later. For now, Apt was there to analyze and explain; to set the crooked straight.

"Eighteen times the speed of sound," he said quietly of the shuttle's reentry speed. "When something goes wrong, it'll go wrong in a big hurry."

He imagines his friends had two seconds to realize it.

He pulled up another view on the screen. A weather radar had picked up the debris field that stretched from Dallas to the Texas-Louisiana border.

It is inevitable that, at some point, the personal loss will register for Apt. He has no doubts that the program must continue.

"I look at it and say absolutely we ought to be doing this and everyone of the people I knew on that flight would be saying the same thing," Apt said.

He got up to leave for home.

What next?

"Well, I'm gonna hug my wife."

Pat Palazzalo

Pat Palazzalo, a finalist for the Teacher in Space flight aboard the doomed Challenger shuttle 17 years ago, spoke just on Friday of the dangers of space flight. "My words haunt me," she said yesterday.

Pat Palazzalo slept in. At 49, the Upper St. Clair teacher was a space junkie. Twenty-years ago she was one of 10 finalists to become the first teacher in space, losing out to Christa McAuliffe.

After the Challenger disaster, Palazzalo stayed with the program, becoming a "space ambassador" promoting the space program. She'd set the alarm to be up in time to watch Columbia make its 28th landing and the alarm didn't work,

The phone jangled her awake. Her husband was calling from work.

It's Columbia, he said. Turn on the TV.

On the screen she watched the white tracings of Columbia's reentry split into smaller lines as it disintegrated. She heard the voice-over, the voices of NASA officials. Some of them were familiar. Those people had shown her students the excitement of the space program.

Seventeen years earlier, Palazzolo was at the launch site when Challenger broke apart in cataracts of smoke and flame above Cape Canaveral. Then a teacher in the Clairton School District, Palazzolo had been a finalist for the Teacher In Space program. McAuliffe spoke fondly of the other finalists.

"I've made nine wonderful friends over the last two weeks and when that shuttle goes, there might be one body, but there's going to be 10 souls I'm taking with me,"' she said.

Palazzolo's was one of the souls riding with McAuliffe that day. In 1998, her students sent up an experiment to test the effects of cosmic radiation of "sea monkeys" -- brine shrimp, in reality -- and Chia pets. Their test flew with John Glenn.

On Friday, she had done a presentation for girls at Keystone Oaks Middle School, talking about what it means to explore space. Someone asked about the dangers.

Everyone works to keep astronauts safe, she told them. But it's a risky business. Yes, she said, we might lose another one, maybe during landing, something that has never happened before.

"My words are coming back," Palazzolo said yesterday. "My words haunt me."

Zur Goldblum

	Zur Goldblum and he son Daniel, 14, now of Squirrel Hill, were neighbors of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon in Israel.

Zur Goldblum was at his son's hockey game in Bethel Park. Like his friend, Ilan Ramon, who spent the past 16 days circling the Earth aboard Columbia, Goldblum kept the Jewish sabbath informally.

Ramon, an Israeli pilot, had been Goldblum's next-door neighbor in Reut, a small town halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Their sons played together. The two fathers became close.

Goldblum was an ordinary guy. Ramon was a pilot and a local celebrity in Reut. He led the squadron of fighter pilots who bombed an Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981.

"He was extremely modest," Goldblum said. "He acted like a normal person, down-to-earth, and he always talked nicely to everybody."

Goldblum's son, Daniel, now 14, attended school with Ramon's son, Assaf. When Ramon left Israel for the United States to train as an astronaut, Goldblum left for Pittsburgh to serve as a cultural emissary to the United Jewish Federation.

So when the hockey fans at the Bethel Park rink broke away from the game yesterday to watch the disaster being reported on television, the loss cut deep.

As a child of Holocaust survivors, Goldblum felt a bond with Ramon, whose mother survived Auschwitz.

When Goldblum contemplated how close his people came to extinction, and then saw a child of a Holocaust survivor flying into space with an Israeli flag on his shoulder, what could he be but proud?

"Between the war, the economy, the attacks, the Palestinian issue, it's been a great point of light," Goldblum said. "For an Israeli astronaut to be in space is really incredible. It's beyond understanding."

Now, the same could be said for the loss.

"People are devastated," Goldblum said. "People feel nothing goes right anymore."

Dani Goldberg

A television crew was clearing out of Jay Apt's office at Carnegie Mellon. Across the hall, Dani Goldberg squinted in front of a large, flat computer screen.

Behind him was a marker board covered with formulas and charts decipherable only to him.

"Actually, I'm working on a NASA project," he explained. "Heterogeneous multi-rover coordination."

Asked a third time, he explained that he was working on ways to get robots to interact and help each other once we land them on other planets. Think of the Mars Rover with assistants.

Yes, he said, he had heard about Columbia. He was 12 when Challenger blew up. Yes, he works in robots, but he believes in manned space flight.

"I think it's the ultimate goal," Goldberg said.

Goldberg is not yet 30. A post-doctoral researcher, he knew nobody on the Columbia. He has not been to space.

"It's not just because they're seven people. Seven people probably die every second.

"They're doing something that captures our imagination, our spirit of discovery."

Allan Naplan

Allan Naplan's new-found friend was aboard the Columbia.

Naplan, a Squirrel Hill resident and the Pittsburgh Opera's director of artistic administration, had been honored when his arrangement of American patriotic tunes, "An American Anthem" was chosen to wake up Columbia's astronauts on Jan. 17, the first morning of their orbit.

The choral work, orchestrated by Pittsburgh Symphony resident conductor Lucas Richman, premiered in August at a San Antonio concert of the Texas All State Children's Choir. Columbia Cmdr. Rick Husband's daughter was singing in the choir. The commander's wife was also there. She was touched by the piece and by Naplan's comments to the children about its meaning.

"The work is a memorial to the Sept. 11 attacks," he recounted last night. "I had talked to the children singers about how every generation has a tragedy it remembers. For them it would be Sept. 11, but for me it was the Challanger disaster."

Not long after, Husband chose it for the shuttle wake up.

Since then, Naplan said, he and Husband and the astronaut's family had become close. In fact, he recalled sadly, he had watched Columbia blast into space with Husband's family as a special guest.

He spoke from the Byham Theater stage about his connection to the tragedy last night during the first intermission of the Pittsburgh Opera's production of Benjamin Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." He then asked for a moment of silence.

Staff writer Andrew Druckenbrod contributed to this report.