Ilan Ramon

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Ilan Ramon
Ilan Ramon
Country: Israel
Organization: air force
selected on May 1997
Calls: 1 space flight
Begin: January 16, 2003
Time in space: 15d 22h 20min
retired on February 1, 2003
(accident)
Space flights
Ramon's tomb in Nahalal

Ilan Ramon ( Hebrew אילן רמון; *  June 20, 1954 in Tel Aviv , Israel as Ilan Wolfermann ; † February 1, 2003 over the southern United States ) was a colonel in the Israeli Air Force and the first space traveler in his country.

Life

Ramon was born the son of a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp . In 1962 he moved with his family to Beersheba and attended school there until 1972. He then joined the air force in his country and took part in the Yom Kippur War in the fall of 1973 . Training as a fighter pilot was followed by operations on type A-4 "Skyhawk" and Mirage III fighters . After joining the Israeli Air Force, he changed his last name from Wolfermann to Ramon.

When the Israeli Air Force received the first F-16 fighters , Ramon was sent to the United States. At Hill Air Force Base in Utah , he completed a course for the "Fighting Falcon" machines. Back in Israel, he was appointed deputy commander of an F-16 squadron for two years.

As only became known after his death, Ramon was one of eight pilots who flew an attack against the Iraqi nuclear reactor Osirak in June 1981 as part of " Operation Opera " . The F-16 squadron set off from the now-abandoned Etzion airfield in Sinai , which was occupied by Israel at the time , covered over a thousand kilometers and destroyed the reactor near Baghdad before it could go into operation. A French scientist was also killed. Ramon was the squadron's youngest pilot - three days before his 27th birthday. He was entrusted with the navigation and had set the course for the four-hour mission. Exactly one year later, Ramon was one of the soldiers involved in the Israeli Lebanon War of 1982 : Israeli troops entered Lebanon between April and September and besieged the capital, Beirut, for 70 days .

Then Ramon interrupted his military service and began to study. He enrolled at Tel Aviv University, studying electronics and computer science . After four years, he was awarded the bachelor's degree in 1987 .

In 1988 Ramon was assigned to an F-4 "Phantom II" squadron, where he served two years as vice-commander. He was then appointed commander of an F-16 squadron, before he was transferred to the materials procurement office in 1992: initially as head of the air force department and two years later as head of weapons development. He held this position until 1998.

death

Ilan Ramon died along with six other crew members when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on February 1, 2003 when it reentered the earth's atmosphere .

Astronaut activity

Lunar landscape by Petr Ginz

Together with his colleague from the Air Force, Itzhak Mayo , Ramon was selected in 1997 to take part in a space shuttle mission as a payload specialist. Space cooperation between Israel and the United States goes back to an agreement of December 1995. Shimon Peres , the then Israeli Prime Minister, and US President Bill Clinton agreed to conduct space-based environmental protection experiments. Associated with this was the participation of an Israeli spaceman.

Ramon and Mayo were selected by the Israeli Space Agency in May 1997 - they were looking for members of the Air Force with a degree in a technical or scientific subject - and began training in the summer of the following year at NASA's Johnson Space Center . Together with the participants of NASA's 17th astronaut group, the two completed the basic course from summer 1998.

After Ramon was selected to take part in the shuttle flight STS-107 in the fall of 2000 , the Israelis Mayo withdrew from further preparations. The training of the reserve man became too costly for them.

At the time of Ramon's selection in 1997, his space flight was scheduled for May 2000. Due to delays in the shuttle program, the Columbia mission was repeatedly postponed. When the crew was deployed at the end of 2000, it was assumed that they would start in July 2001. In fact, this only took place in early 2003. Scientific research was carried out on board for two weeks. In the Spacehab module, the astronauts carried out over 80 experiments that ran around the clock. For this reason the team worked in two shifts. Ramon was a member of the Red Team with Commander Husband and the mission specialists Chawla and Clark. The remaining crew members made up the blue team. On its return, the space shuttle broke up just 16 minutes before the planned landing. All astronauts on board were killed.

One of the experiments that Ramon was particularly concerned about was developed by researchers from his alma mater : MEIDEX (MEditerranean Israeli Dust EXperiment) examined the question of the influence of dust particles in the atmosphere ( aerosols ) on global warming . Ramon's recordings with a multispectral camera of the Mediterranean region and the west coast of Africa provided radiometric data that were linked with ground-based information to produce an overall picture.

Ilan Ramon wanted to document what the Holocaust meant to him as a child of an Auschwitz survivor and his country. He turned to Yad Vashem because he wanted to take an object with him on his space flight that was reminiscent of the Shoah . The Jerusalem memorial selected a small pencil drawing entitled "Moonscape". It comes from Petr Ginz , a Jew who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944 after two years in Theresienstadt at the age of 16. Yad Vashem chose the drawing from 1942 because Ramon's mother and grandmother were also in Auschwitz - and survived. (Ramon took a copy of the "lunar landscape" with him, the original is still in Jerusalem). In addition, Ramon also took a credit card sized microfiche - Bible with which his Israeli President Moshe Katsav had given, as well as some mezuzah and a Torah .

Ramon wasn't the first Jew to fly into space, but he was the first to ask to be allowed to take kosher food on board. He also wanted to try to keep the Sabbath . He wanted to symbolize his solidarity with all Jews, because he was not religious.

Ramon, who wanted to move into a new apartment in Ramat Gan after his flight with his family , left behind his wife Rona and four children. The remains of his body were transferred to Israel and buried ten days after the space shuttle crashed in Nahalal , not far from the tomb of Moshe Dayan .

Others

In commemoration, the asteroid (51828) Ilanramon , an elevation on Mars (Ramon Hill), a small crater on the moon and (on the third anniversary of his death) a hill in the Ramon crater near the Israeli town of Mitzpe Ramon were named after Ilan Ramon . In 2004 he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor .

Ramon's son Assaf, also a trained fighter pilot , died in September 2009 at the age of 21 in a military plane crash. He had intended to complete his father's path as an astronaut.

His widow, Rona Ramon founded the Ramon Foundation, which brings space travel closer to children and young people on behalf of Ilan and Assaf Ramon.

Eilat International Airport, which opened on January 21, 2019, was named after Ramon and his son Assaf. Ramon Airport replaces the previous small J. Hozman Airport in the city and has an annual capacity of 2.5 million passengers.

In 2019, his widow, Rona Ramon, who had died a year earlier, received the Israel Prize posthumously .

Web links

Commons : Ilan Ramon  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography of Ilan Ramons on spacefacts.de
  2. ↑ Article in the Haaretz (Engl.)
  3. ↑ The proud son is now lying next to his father , article on faz.de.
  4. ^ Sabine Brandes: Mourning for Rona Ramon. In: www.juedische-allgemeine.de. January 20, 2019, accessed January 20, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Ramon Airport in Eilat as a new tourist magnet. In: Israelnetz .de. January 22, 2019, accessed January 22, 2019 .
  6. ^ Astronaut widow awarded posthumously with Israel Prize. In: Israelnetz .de. April 3, 2019, accessed April 29, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ramon, Ilan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli astronaut
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Ramat Gan , Israel
DATE OF DEATH February 1, 2003
Place of death United States