Dorm converted to classroom building named after two of the Columbia astronauts

A classroom building that used to be a dormitory at the Pensacola Naval Air Station was dedicated on Friday to two of the seven Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts who died on February 1, 2003.

The Laurel B. Clark and David M. Brown Aerospace Medicine Academic Center was dedicated in a ceremony attended by relatives of the two Navy Captains who were on their first missions to space when the orbiter broke up over Texas on reentry.

"We dedicate this building to say thank you for their courage, to honor their spirit and to say to every successive generation that these were the greatest of humankind — the explorers," said Rear Adm. Donald C. Arthur, the Navy's surgeon general.

During the ceremony, Douglas Brown, 50, talked about the last time his younger brother visited him for the holidays, a month before the launch. "I said, `Dave, it's pretty risky. What do you want me to say if you didn't come back?' He said, `Well, I would want the program to go on.'"

Laurel Clark's husband, Capt. Jon Clark, USN (Ret.), talked about a letter his wife had sent to a friend years before the accident took her life. "She said `The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The man or woman who does nothing has nothing, is nothing,'" Clark said.

FMI: www.nasa.gov/columbia/home, www.naspensacola.navy.mil