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MILWAUKEE - Jon Clark - the husband of astronaut Laurel Salton Clark - falls quiet when he remembers that his wife's interest in becoming an astronaut was sparked after she acted as a dead body in a practice rescue mission in 1991.
"I'm really interested in doing this," she told her husband.
Eerie details, moving memories and an abrupt goodbye are parts of a coming biography Clark is writing about his wife, who succeeded in becoming an astronaut on the space shuttle Columbia, loved being a wife and whose worst fear was to leave her only son behind.
"To place your ideas, your dreams, before the crowd is to risk loss," she wrote to a friend in 1981. "To try at all is to risk failure. But to risk we must."
Clark started the book about their relationship before the Columbia disaster of 2003, but her death and his own investigation into the case accelerated the writing process.
His project is especially poignant now with the launch of space shuttle Discovery. Many of the families of Columbia have sent mementos from the last shuttle.
"It's not just a book about Laurel and how she was dealt a very cruel blow. It's about a nation's struggle to handle complex technical stuff," Clark said.
He is completing the book and looking for a publisher. He plans to dedicate the book to families of space shuttle Challenger, which blew up in 1986.
"If their lessons had been heard, maybe we wouldn't be in this position," he said.
He wants parts of the book to focus on his investigation. Clark, who works as a flight surgeon for NASA and lives in Houston, has criticized the organization for its handling of the case. He said when NASA investigated the disaster, investigators uncovered an earring that Laurel Clark wore while on the mission. Clark said he desperately tried to find that earring but never did.
He reviewed her autopsy and surveyed the graphic images from the tragedy.
"I just didn't trust the system that it told me the truth. I wanted to see from the very beginning," he said.
Other parts of the book will chronicle happier times.
The couple met in Florida in 1989 at a Navy diving school and began dating in April of that year. Clark was impressed with her tenacity, spunkiness and strong swimming skills.
"I was certainly captivated about her," he said. "She was very spirited and independent kind of person."
He followed her to Wisconsin and Connecticut, where she was stationed. Laurel Clark grew up in Racine, Wis. They took a trip to Scotland, where he proposed. In the early years of their marriage, they took trips to scuba dive in the Cayman Islands and traveled to Arizona and Utah.
He also wants the book to illustrate that Laurel Clark took motherhood seriously. When she received her letter of selection to enter the astronaut track, she feared it would get in the way of being a mom to their son, Iain.
"Should I even do this?" Clark remembered her asking a friend.
A major part of the book addresses the life he and son, Iain, have led since 2003. Clark never thought he'd be a single parent, and - on some days - he struggles, he says.
"In the beginning, it was really hard," 10-year-old Iain said.
Clark said he is already thinking about writing another book that pertains to her childhood in Wisconsin and her college years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied to be a veterinarian.
"It's a remarkably inspirational story," he said. "Even though it didn't work out, for their survival, they did give it their all."
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(c) 2005, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
