Bush Joins NASA ‘Family’ in Mourning

More than 12,000 members of the NASA “family,” joined by President Bush and hundreds of dignitaries, set aside their exhaustive investigation Tuesday long enough to memorialize the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, four days after the craft disintegrated over Texas.

Under a brilliant sky, an Air Force band played a plaintive dirge as mourners crammed every corner of a courtyard inside the Johnson Space Center, the NASA compound at the southern edge of Houston where the Columbia crew lived and trained for three years before their ill-fated January launch.

The seven members of the crew were remembered as dreamers and pioneers, and placed on a mantle that NASA reserves for those it considers martyrs of America’s space program -- the three men who died in the 1967 Apollo accident and the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded in 1986 shortly after liftoff.

As space pioneers John Glenn and Neil Armstrong took their seats, hundreds of people massed outside the front gates, though they couldn’t see or hear a thing.

Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, clad in black and their hands clasped, sat up front with the families of the crew. The president wore a lapel pin that had once been the mission’s insignia -- a small replica of the space shuttle etched with the names of the crew.

The same insignia was used on the patches the astronauts wore on their uniform sleeves; one of those patches was discovered Sunday in a Texas field.

“We are like a breath,” Rabbi Harold Robinson, captain of the U.S. Naval Research chaplain corps, said to open the ceremony, adopting the words of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. “Our days are like a passing shadow.”

Bush said the accident should remind the country of the risks, and the potential benefit, of space exploration.

“We send the best among us into unmapped darkness and pray they will return,” Bush said. “They go in peace for all of mankind, and all of mankind is in their debt. Yet some explorers do not return, and the loss settles unfairly on a few. The sorrow is lonely, but you are not alone.”

Facing the president were the parents, wives and husbands of the astronauts -- Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, William C. McCool, Rick D. Husband, Laurel Clark and David M. Brown. But Bush seemed to reserve his most personal message for the 12 children of the crew.

“You need to know they loved you, and that love will always be with you,” Bush said. “They were proud of you. And you can be proud of them for the rest of your life.”

In his dress uniform, a Navy sailor rang a brass bell seven times to close the 47-minute ceremony as four T-38 jets roared over the crowd, coming in low from the southwest. One jet, completing military aviation’s traditional missing-man formation, broke from the others, banked into a sharp climb and soared toward the heavens.

The service capped three days of memorials here, from Sunday church services, including one that featured Cmdr. Husband’s former choir, to a temple memorial Monday at which the father of Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut, tried to assure America that NASA was “doing its best.”

Simultaneously in Orange County on Tuesday morning, about 600 people bowed their heads in prayer as spotlights glinted off the glass panes and shone on the 90-foot American flag at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

After remarks by the Rev. Robert Schuller, the consul general of Israel and a Jewish rabbi, the mixture of regular parishioners and tourists turned their attention to the Jumbotron beside the altar, where the Houston memorial service was carried live.

Pamela Leestma, a teacher whose cousin David Leestma flew on the Columbia in 1989, will be taking the cathedral’s sign-in book to Houston this week when she attends a conference for educators about the international space station.

“We need to encourage [NASA] to move forward for the joy of discovery, which we can’t take away from the next generation, and for the science and math that improves our life,” Leestma said.

Houston’s memorial was intensely personal, almost painfully so to many of the mourners gathered at the space center. The crew was saluted as a diverse group of people, men and women from three nations and of differing backgrounds, who came together as a family and had performed harmoniously for 16 days before the accident.

They were not only comrades, said Navy Capt. Kent V. Rominger, the chief of the astronaut corps, but playful companions, a group that adopted as its mascot a toy hamster that played the ‘70s song “Kung Fu Fighting” when wound up.

In the most poignant portion of the ceremony, Rominger, who knew each member of the crew, listed the astronauts by first name, telling the crowd what they will be remembered for inside the walls of the NASA compound. “Ilan ... he was the perfectly poised fighter pilot with a sparkle in his eye. Laurel ... the dedicated professional ... queen of paraphernalia,” collecting T-shirts and patches.

“Mike ... thorough, someone you could absolutely count on. Smiling Dave ... the bachelor, in constant search for food. Willie ... incredibly humble with exceptional talents. Rick ... a terrific human being, a naturally gifted pilot.

“Kalpana,” who often put on a Southern accent to tell her fellow crew members when the going got rough, “ ‘Man, you are training to fly in space. What more could you want?’ ”

Outside Johnson Space Center, the visitors gathered at the main entrance missed the president, who used a side road, and most of them missed the television broadcasts of the memorial service. But none of them seemed to mind.

“It’s OK,” said Hector Jordan, 20, a resident of nearby Lake City. “At least we’re here. And this way, we can pay our respects.”

The space center’s large concrete sign at the entrance was bedecked with flowers, balloons, flags and posters that visitors had begun placing there within a few hours of Saturday’s tragedy. The occasion was solemn, but the site took on an air of determined optimism Tuesday as a group of children sang patriotic songs and the flags fluttered briskly under a bright sun.

One poster summed up the prevailing sentiment: “President Bush, please don’t let them die in vain. Keep NASA alive!” Bush, during his remarks at the ceremony, said he planned to do just that. Those were comforting words to the Houston region which, beyond losing the astronauts, has faced renewed economic concerns in the wake of the Columbia accident.

“That was reassuring, particularly the fervor and the confidence with which the president said it,” said Rex R. Ritz, a retired NASA official who attended the memorial. “He hasn’t waited for a second to say that we aren’t going to cut this program. The science is out there. It’s marvelous. The NASA vision is marvelous.”

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Times staff writers Eric Malnic in Houston and Jia-Rui Chong in Orange County contributed to this report.