October 05, 2008	Sunday	Shawwal 05, 1429

JERUSALEM: Pages from a diary written by an astronaut on board the doomed space shuttle Columbia are to go on display on Sunday, more than five years after the mission disintegrated on re-entry to Earth.

Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was one of the seven crew members on board the shuttle, which broke up on February 1, 2003, 16 minutes before it was due to land at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

However, more than 30 pages of the diary kept by him somehow survived not only the catastrophe but also two months of sun, wind and rain.

“Today was the first day that I felt that I am truly living in space. I have become a man who lives and works in space,” he wrote on the last day of the journal, two pages of which will be unveiled at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Saturday.

One contains notes written by the astronaut, while the other is the Kiddush prayer, a blessing over wine that Jews recite on the Sabbath. Ramon copied the prayer into his diary so he could recite it on the space shuttle and have the blessing broadcast to Earth.

Ramon was a secular Israeli but he tried to represent all Jewish identities, including the religious and Holocaust survivors.

The diary, written in black ink and pencil, covers only the first six days of the 16-day mission and contains personal musings, technical notes such as suitable medication for backache and how to operate a microphone, as well as topics Ramon planned to discuss in broadcasts from space.

Some of 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. Remarkably, the papers remain white, not charred black from the explosion, which occurred 37 miles above the Earth. All seven of the crew died after a chunk of foam insulation from the fuel tank gashed the Columbia’s wing, forcing it to plunge to Earth.

The diary took about a year to restore and it took Israeli police scientists about four more years to decipher. Approximately 80 per cent of the text has been deciphered.—Dawn/Guardian News Service