To Racine's Laurel Clark, killed in 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, life a 'magical thing'

Laurel Clark, like all space shuttle astronauts, was very busy during her 16-day trip into space. 

The Racine native and Navy doctor was a mission specialist who helped conduct some of the 80 experiments aboard the space shuttle, including the effect of gravity on humans and gene transfer of plants. 

But she also took time to look out the shuttle portholes at the magnificent view moving underneath the spacecraft traveling at 17,500 mph.

"I have seen some incredible sights: lightning spreading over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis lighting up the entire visible horizon with the city glow of Australia below … rivers breaking through tall mountain passes, the scars of humanity … a crescent moon setting over the limb of our blue planet," Clark wrote in her last email to her family from space. 

"Whenever I do get to look out, it is glorious. Even the stars have a special brightness."

Fifteen years ago, the seven-person crew of Space Shuttle Columbia died when the spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry just 16 minutes before it was due to land in Florida on Feb. 1, 2003. Clark was 41. 

During a memorial service at Johnson Space Center, President George W. Bush noted Clark's down-to-earth demeanor. 

"A friend who heard Laurel speaking to Mission Control said there was a smile in her voice," said the president. 

Clark grew up in Racine, graduating from Horlick High School in 1979 before heading to Madison, where she earned a bachelor's degree in zoology in 1983 at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in medicine in 1987.

She is featured with other notable Badger alumni in the recently opened Discovery exhibit along Alumni Way in a park between the Memorial Union and Red Gym on the UW-Madison campus. 

Clark joined the Navy and became an undersea medical officer, learning how to perform medical evacuations from submarines. Later she became a flight surgeon and joined NASA in 1996. She married a fellow Navy doctor and had a son, Iain. 

In April 2000, Clark visited Bayside Middle School at the invitation of Martha Wilson, a fifth-grade science teacher who was a roommate at UW. Clark patiently answered the usual questions from students, explaining how astronauts go to the bathroom and stay clean in space and what it's like to ride in the KC-135 plane dubbed the "Vomit Comet" to practice zero gravity. 

She told Journal Sentinel reporter Gary Rummler after the class "I try not to be too preachy. But hopefully, they will see me as a positive role model and that when science is applied, it can be pretty exciting." 

Three years later, she got her chance to go to space. She packed a different pastel-colored shirt with crew patches and matching earrings to wear each day, and helped conduct experiments to better understand the physics of combustion in microgravity, growing bone-forming cells to learn more about osteoporosis and creating two kinds of protein crystals in space for possible bone cancer therapies. 

Clark knew the risks of space travel and knew she had earned the incredible opportunity to travel into space to learn, experiment and convey her sense of wonder to others. 

Describing a silkworm cocoon that hatched in the space shuttle, Clark said: "There was a moth in there and it still had its wings crumpled up, and it was just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lots of places, and life is a magical thing."