Col Ilan Ramon

Israel's first astronaut

Ilan Wolferman (Ilan Ramon), air-force officer and astronaut: born Tel Aviv 20 June 1954; married (three sons, one daughter); died over Texas 1 February 2003.

Combat pilots are the élite of Israeli service personnel. Ilan Ramon, the air-force colonel killed in the Columbia space-shuttle disaster, was among the élite of the élite, a clean-cut, idealised war hero who would have been at home in the pages of Leon Uris's 1958 novel Exodus.

He was the son of a Holocaust survivor, a super-achiever, a brave warrior who twice bailed out of stricken warplanes, yet at the same time a family man, remembered for his calmness and easy humour. Israelis cherished him not only because he was their first man in space, but because, in the messy guerrilla war now thrust upon them by the Palestinian intifada, heroes don't come like that any more.

General Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, who as air-force commander in the mid-Nineties chose Ramon for Nasa's Columbia mission, said:

When I had to select from 10 candidates, all very talented guys, I had no hesitation in going for Ilan. He was always selected to be one of the first in everything.

Ilan Ramon was born in 1954, in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. His mother, Tova Wolferman, had come through Auschwitz. The family soon moved south to Beersheba. As a schoolboy growing up there, Ramon wanted to be a basketball player, but recognised that he wasn't tall enough. He joked later that his compact build was an asset in the space shuttle.

He volunteered for the air force at 18, graduating top of his class two years later and going straight into battle, flying Skyhawks in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He also fought in the 1982 Lebanon War. When the air force upgraded to the American F-16 in 1980, Ramon was a member of the first squadron to fly the "Fighting Falcon", designed for both air supremacy and ground attack. "We selected the top guns," Ben-Eliyahu recalled, "to set a standard."

Ramon, whose career embraced 4,000 hours of flying time, was the youngest pilot on the mission that bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, flying over Arab territory in a tight formation that transmitted a radar signal like that of a commercial airliner.

Two years later, he left the air force to study electronic and computer engineering at Tel-Aviv University. As a civilian, he worked in the Israel Aircraft Industries team developing the Lavi, an advanced fighter cancelled in 1986 because it was too expensive. He returned to the air force, serving as a squadron commander. In 1994, he was appointed to head a department developing new weapons systems for the air-force missions of the 21st century.

When he was asked whether he would like to be an astronaut, his first reaction was: "You must be kidding." He explained afterwards that "astronaut" was Hebrew slang for a dreamer with his head in the clouds. In 1998, he moved to Texas, with his wife and four children, to train for the Columbia mission.

Interviewed by the Israeli daily paper Ma'ariv before the launch, he said:

I have been through enough shocking experiences in my life, so that flying in a space shuttle does not frighten me. I am more frightened driving on the Tel Aviv ring road.

Although Ramon was not religious, he insisted on eating kosher food in space and took with him a special "kiddush" glass for toasting the Sabbath. He carried a pencil drawing, Moon Landscape, by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy killed in Auschwitz, as well as a credit-card sized microfiche of the Old Testament. He was carrying the hopes, he explained, not only of Israel, but of the Jewish people.

Eric Silver