A Passion Fueled by Mercury, Apollo

By the time he was 4, Rick D. Husband knew he wanted to travel into space.

Like many children during those years, he was dazzled by the astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, whose exploits he watched on television at his boyhood home in Amarillo, Texas. He contacted NASA’s astronaut recruiters when he was a college sophomore at Texas Tech University. The letter he got back listing the program’s requirements became a checklist that guided the rest of his life.

Dr. James Lawrence, chairman of Texas Tech’s mechanical engineering department, where Husband studied, remembers him as bright and directed, an instant standout. “You kind of sense students who are going to be successful,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of students who wanted to be astronauts, but he was the only one who made it.”

Husband, 45, invited Lawrence to attend both of his shuttle liftoffs. “I’m sorry I didn’t go,” Lawrence said, then paused. “Well, I don’t know if I’m sorry now.”

The year after Husband graduated from Texas Tech, he watched another space mission on television: the landing of America’s first space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, in 1981. “I remember the day, how excited he and his wife were about the space shuttle landing for the first time,” said Terry Hargrave, who attended Amarillo High School with Husband and was his friend for more than 30 years. “That was where his heart was directed, to achieve that. And of course he did.”

After college, Husband’s career quite literally took off. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force and became an instructor and a test pilot. He spent two years in a pilot exchange program with the Royal Air Force in Britain before being named an astronaut candidate in December 1994. His lifelong yearning for spaceflight was satisfied five years later, when he flew on the shuttle Discovery in May and June 1999.

Though Husband’s demeanor was typically understated, his joy and wonder seeped through when he returned to Texas Tech’s Lubbock campus afterward to speak to students and present a university flag he had taken with him into space.

“He was just tremendously excited,” said Texas Tech President Donald Haragan. “You could just tell in his face.” (Husband took a sweatshirt from Fresno State, where he earned a master’s in mechanical engineering in 1990, with him into space on Columbia’s mission. He was scheduled to return it to the campus in April.)

After the Discovery mission, Husband visited Hargrave and his family, toting a large album of pictures from the spaceflight. “He talked about how incredible it was to be weightless, how fun it was to have his crew members spinning around,” Hargrave said. “He just loved the whole endeavor.”

Though cooperative with the public demands of the space program, Husband took pains to safeguard his family, particularly his children, from the spotlight, friends say. He and his wife, Evelyn, had been sweethearts at Amarillo High. They had two children, Laura, 11, and Matthew, 6. His daughter sang with her church choir for Columbia’s crew about two weeks ago on their 4:39 a.m. wake-up call on liftoff day.

“Apart from NASA,” Husband said in a preflight interview, “the most enjoyable part of my life has been my time with my family. If you think about it, probably the pinnacle or most exciting events I would say were my marriage and then the birth of our two children and being there with my wife and just the awesome experience of seeing a baby come into the world.”

Husband was a devout Christian and deeply involved in his church, 4,000-member Grace Community in Clear Lake, Texas, which serves as a kind of parish church to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Another Grace congregant was Husband’s Columbia crewmate, Michael Anderson, and the two forged a bond through their spirituality.

“Their faith in Jesus Christ was the No. 1 priority in both of their lives,” said the Rev. Garrett Booth, the executive pastor. “They lived that out in their marriages and in their fatherhood.”

Husband lent his strong voice to the church choir and sang a solo on the group’s album.

Charley Hargrave, father of Husband’s friend Terry and a science teacher at Amarillo High, summed up the astronaut this way: “He was an exemplary man, and the way I feel about it, he lived and breathed and died an astronaut.”