Diary of an astronaut
Oct 13, 02:20 PM
Fragment of Ilan Ramon’s diary
This short article in the Guardian newspaper Saturday October 4, 2008 p.26, stuck with me. The loss of the space shuttle Columbia was an event that many of us will remember and have seen mediated by television, however, the painstaking recovery and reconstruction of Ilan Ramon’s journal and his words seemed remarkable. Not only had the words survived the catastrophe but their two-month long exposure to the wind, sun and rain, as they lay waiting to be found. The pages were tattered and torn, some were pierced with tiny holes, some were tightly stuck to others, while some pieces were compacted into wads as small as a fingernail. The 37 pages were found just over two months after the shuttle explosion, wet and crumpled, in a field just outside the U.S. town of Palestine, Texas. That Ramon was an Israeli, and his words were found in a small town called Palestine, seems the strangest of coincidences; that these fragile pages survived at all, seems to defy rational thought.