Ten years since loss of space shuttle Columbia

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.

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