Cape Canaveral, Fla. — His face peered out this week from every television set in the United States. It was impossible to escape him. It was impossible to stop looking at him. My heart ached, a real heartache. This time, I couldn’t stop the tears.
Even I’m allowed. So what if I’m a cynical journalist who, in a career spanning over 30 years, covered wars, earthquakes, terrorist attacks and grieving families? I always tried to block emotions and hide behind my mask of professionalism.
Last Saturday morning, the mask broke.
I was standing next to the enormous landing strip at Cape Canaveral, exactly three minutes before the anticipated landing, waiting to hear a pair of sonic booms signifying the Space Shuttle Columbia’s landing approach.
Standing very near me are Rona and the children. I know they’re there in the VIP room behind the wall, but I can’t see them. Since the Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA separates the families of the astronauts from journalists during takeoffs and landings, in the event of a disaster.
When the huge NASA digital clock races toward the zero mark, the anticipated landing time, I think of the nerve-wracking moments Rona and the children must be going through in anticipation of their happy reunion with Ilan.
Just 16 days ago, during the launch, they held hands in excitement and roared as if they wanted to help the shuttle gather energy to make it safely to space.
“I wasn’t scared even for a second. I knew everything would be okay. I know Ilan smiled happily in the shuttle all the way to space and I was happy with him for the realization of his life’s dream,” Rona told me an hour after the launch.
Only little five-year-old Noa had shouted, “I lost my Daddy.” During their last meeting while hugging her father, Noa said that the shuttle would explode, and Ilan reassured her with a smile: “That only happens in movies.”
Pleasant and brave
Noa was just an infant when Ilan arrived with his family to the United States four-and-a-half years ago. The family settled in the town of Clearwater, Tex., and Ilan left for his new workplace at the Johnson Space Center.
I soon flew to Houston to interview the first Israeli astronaut for the daily newspaper Ma’ariv. At our first meeting I still saw him as Col. Ramon, the legendary fighter pilot, secret bomber of the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, a brave pilot who risked his life in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the Lebanon war in 1982.
During subsequent years of one-on-one interviews and many more phone conversations, however, the boundary between the journalist and the colonel blurred. Behind the uniform I discovered a beautiful man, pleasant, intelligent and brave. The kind you’d like your daughter to meet. The kind you’d be proud to have as your friend.
During my many interviews with him, I learned several fascinating things about the U.S. space program. But even more important, I learned about the character of Ilan Ramon. Serious, intense, always prepared and organized, diligent about doing his homework, never one to trust luck.
He arrived in Houston as an experienced fighter pilot but quickly learned that no one expects him to fly the shuttle and bomb the moon. He needed to forget that, swallow his pride and work the many science experiments assigned to him.
Ilan studied his scientific missions seriously, and especially took pride in those from his alma mater, Tel Aviv University, whose banner he took into space.
Though he’d originally come to NASA as a payload specialist, he was quickly transformed into an astronaut in every sense of the word, familiar with all the systems and able to perform every possible mission. NASA people couldn’t get enough of him. I couldn’t either.
I’d pestered Ilan more than once with the question that bothered me most: Was he afraid of an accident in space? At first he tried to explain that after his combat experience, which included two injuries, he wasn’t afraid of anything. When I continued my pestering he merely smiled.
As the years went by, I learned what an optimist Ilan Ramon was. Maybe the biggest I’d ever met. Before going into space, astronauts customarily prepare their wills. Ilan didn’t.
I asked him about everything. I even asked him about sex in space. Ilan answered with a smile that there are only two things that aren’t discussed at NASA — sex and death.
So what’s the thing that scared him most of all? Disappointing the scientists in whose name he’d gone into space. “One wrong move on my part could destroy an experiment 20 years in the making,” Ilan told me.
Closing a circle
Few journalists came to see the Columbia land on Saturday morning. The launch was supposed to be the dangerous and exciting part, the landing routine. But having accompanied Ilan for four-and-a-half years, I came to Cape Canaveral to close a personal circle with him.
At the communications center at the Kennedy Space Center I follow the astronauts on the closed circuit television monitor making final preparations. Houston gives approval for landing. “Go,” the cry of the NASA crew sounds. The time is 8:10 a.m., E.S.T.
We walk outside toward the landing strip. The weather is great, the visibility perfect. It was supposed to be a good conclusion to a perfect space mission.
Everything is ready. Even the stairs are being brought to the sidelines of the landing strip for the astronauts to descend from the parked shuttle.
On the runway, the digital NASA clock shows three minutes to landing. I wait for those twin sonic booms and hear nothing. I wait to see the shuttle glide toward the landing strip but see nothing.
The giant clock continues to race too quickly toward the zero mark and three veteran NASA journalists look at each other apprehensively. No one yells. No one cries. We just stand there, shocked and hurting and realizing that something terrible has happened.
Through loudspeakers, we are requested to return to the bus for the short ride to the communications room. The large clock is already showing a three-minute delay. That can happen with a commercial flight but not at NASA.
The Columbia isn’t late. She’s gone. Ilan Ramon won’t be coming back. He remains in the heavens.
Yitzhak Ben-Horin is the Washington correspondent for Ma’ariv.
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