Today in Technology History
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March 10
Throughout the year, we're going to profile the astronauts who died on the space shuttle Columbia in February, starting today with Dr. Laurel Blair Salton Clark.
Born in Iowa on March 10, 1961, Clark came to consider Wisconsin her home after her family moved there in the mid-1970s. She had three direct siblings, and got five more after her mother remarried. Describing herself, years later, as a "boring, straight-A student" in high school, she went on to study zoology at the University of Wisconsin. Although Clark originally planned to become a veterinarian, she instead studied medicine, getting an M.D. in 1987.
Dr. Clark enjoyed hiking and diving and climbing and canoeing and parachuting. That love of adventure showed in her career choices, too. Joining the U.S. Navy to help pay for school, she spent years working on diving medicine, rescuing sick sailors from submarines. (She even went on a few submarine missions herself, flouting the ban on women serving on subs.) Clark then moved from the seas to the skies and took up aviation medicine, serving as a flight surgeon and learning to fly helicopters.
She was deployed to various sites around the world, including Scotland, where her ancestors came from and where her husband (another naval officer) proposed to her. Despite all her adventures, she said that her most important job was being a mother to her young son, Iain.
Laurel Clark joined NASA in 1996, and the Columbia mission was her first trip into space. She worked on lots of experiments, but the technical and scientific work didn't blind her to the beauty of what she was doing. As she watched roses bloom aboard the shuttle and studied moths in zero-gravity, she said, "Life continues in lots of places, and life is a magical thing."
Dr. Clark was 41 years old when Columbia was lost. The Navy posthumously promoted her to the rank of captain.
Related links:
Use these links to read obituaries of Dr. Clark from the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Click here for NASA's official astronaut biography of Laurel Clark.
Click here to read an e-mail Dr. Clark sent to friends and family from space the day before Columbia was lost.
Click here to visit a memorial site set up in honor of Laurel Clark.
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