From the Office of Biological and Physical Research:
First and foremost our hearts and thoughts go out to the families of the crew. As Administrator O'Keefe said, they gave their lives for something they believed in completely: the peaceful pursuit of discovery. Like the research community they were supporting, the crew was wonderfully diverse in background and culture, and readily joined together in this pursuit. Reflecting the best in the human spirit, the crew sought to advance human exploration of space and to create new knowledge to solve problems facing all of us on earth everyday: from cancer to pollution to energy to a myriad of diseases.

As we mourn, we will first do our part in aiding the investigative teams who will find and correct the cause of this tragedy. In addition, we are also participating in study teams to assess the impact on our research on the International Space Station. However, we plan to stay the course with our research on the Shuttle, the International Space Station, and all of the elements of human space flight. There are people at this moment on the International Space Station performing research of the same spirit and for the same purpose as the crew of STS-107. As distinguished physicist and educator Freeman Dyson once said so eloquently, "the American space program is at its most creative when it is a human adventure".

Please see the NASA Home Page (http://www.nasa.gov) for more information on the Columbia Investigation.

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Office of Biological and Physical Research
http://spaceresearch.nasa.gov
Mail Code UG
NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546-0001
(202) 358-0820, (202) 358-3091 (F)
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