On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded after take off. Nineteen years earlier, on January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 was involved in a training accident which killed the three astronauts on board. And on February 1, 2003, the crew of the Columbia was killed.
Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chafee were killed in the Apollo 1 cabin fire. White was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma.
Edward H. White, II, Phi Kappa Sigma
Lost in the Challenger explosion were: S. Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher who was taking part in an innovative program to put teachers into space; Gregory Jarvis; Judith Resnick; Francis R. “Dick” Scobee; Ronald E. McNair; Mike J. Smith; and Ellison S. Onizuka. McNair was a member of Omega Phi Psi.
Ronald McNair, Omega Psi Phi
Onizuka belonged to Triangle Fraternity.
Ellison S. Onizuka, Triangle Fraternity
Resnick, the second woman in space, was the first American astronaut to be a member of a National Panhellenic Conference organization. Resnick, an Alpha Epsilon Phi from the Carnegie Mellon University chapter, was also the first Jewish-American in space. Alpha Epsilon Phi’s Foundation established the Judith Resnick Memorial Scholarship as a tribute to her. Preference is given to members who are pursuing engineering, science or other related degrees. The sorority also presented a portrait of Resnick to her alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University.
Judith Resnick. Alpha Epsilon Phi
The seven astronauts killed in the Columbia explosion on February 1, 2003, were: Michael Anderson; David Brown; Ilan Ramon; Rick Husband, Willie McCool; Kalpana Chawla; and Laurel Clark.
Clark became a member of Gamma Phi Beta while she was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There is a display of her NASA memorabilia on display in the Sorority’s International Headquarters Museum in Centennial, Colorado.. In 2004, the Gamma Phi Beta Foundation established the Laurel Salton Blair Clark MD Memorial Leadership Endowment which funds Gamma Phi Beta’s LeaderShape Institute, regional leadership conferences, collegiate consultant training and International Convention education programs.
Laurel Clark, Gamma Phi Beta, and her son Iain wrote an article for Scholastic News.
President Ronald Reagan, Tau Kappa Epsilon, was to have delivered the State of the Union address the night of the Challenger explosion. Instead, he gave a tribute to the astronauts. It ended with, “The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'” The phrases in quotes are of the last sentence are from a poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an aviator killed in a 1941 plane crash.
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Robert Overmyer, Alpha Tau Omega (Baldwin-Wallace), flew on both Challenger and Columbia missions. He died on March 22, 1996 testing an experimental airplane.
Robert Overmyer, Alpha Tau Omega
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2015. All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/
