Israeli Air Force fighter pilot, first Israeli astronaut, and national hero Ilan Ramon (Hebrew: אילן רמון; born Ilan Wolferman; June 20, 1954, Ramat Gan, Israel — February 1, 2003, above Texas, United States) is widely honored across his country. Ramon was a payload specialist on the STS-107 scientific mission on the Space Shuttle Columbia. During his 15 days, 22 hours, and 20 minutes in space, he performed a lot of experiments. Unfortunately, the shuttle disintegrated upon its return to Earth, killing everybody aboard.
Ramon was a colonel in the Israeli Air Force and a fighter pilot before he went on his space mission. Over the course of his twenty-year service, he saw action in both the Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War. As part of Operation Opera, he helped blow up the Osirak nuclear reactor in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1981. He spent nearly 4,000 hours in the cockpit of various aircraft throughout his time in the Air Force. He has been in leadership roles since 1990, first as squadron commander and then as Operations Department for Weapons Development and Procurement.
The United States Congress posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, making him the first person from outside the United States to receive this medal. The Jerusalem Post, an Israeli publication, published this about Ramon: “The son of a woman who survived the Holocaust and a father who fought for independence showed that, despite tragedies, Jews have found a place in the world and can be successful.”
Ilan Ramon’s Personal Life
Born Ilan Wolferman in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, Ilan Ramon spent his formative years in Beersheba, in the south of Israel. Eliezer Wolferman, Ramon’s father, was born in Germany and moved to Mandatory Palestine with his family in 1935. When Israel declared its independence in 1948, Eliezer joined his father on the front lines. Tonia “Tova” Kreppel, Ramon’s mother, was of Polish ancestry. She and her mother were the only members of her family to emerge from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp alive. Tova Kreppel met her future husband, Eliezer Wolferman, in Israel in 1949, a year after the end of World War II.
Ilan Wolferman was the younger brother of Gadi Wolferman. He excelled academically, particularly in math and physics, which he found fascinating. His mandatory military duty in the Israel Defense Forces (IOS) began soon after he completed high school in 1972. After turning eighteen, he enlisted in the Israeli Air Force and started classes at the military’s aviation college.
He Hebraized his surname from Wolferman to Ramon (“Exalted”) throughout his time in school. He participated in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and went on to become the top graduate of his class at the Air Force Academy the following year.
He established himself as an officer in the Israeli Air Force during the remainder of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. He attended Tel Aviv University from 1983 to 1987 to get a Bachelor of Science in Electronics and Computer Engineering. After retiring as a colonel from the Air Force in 1998, he began training with the Israel Space Agency to become a space traveler.
He identified as a nonreligious Jew. Nonetheless, he sought advice from rabbis and did his best to maintain Jewish rituals while in Earth orbit. From the space shuttle Columbia, he made a videotaped statement in which he said, “As the first Israeli astronaut, I feel that I represent all Jews and all Israelis.”
It was during his time as a student that Ilan Ramon met his future wife, Rona (then Bar Simantov). Assaf, Tal, and Yiftah were their three boys, while Noa was their only daughter. On September 13, 2009, at the age of only 21, his oldest son, Captain Assaf Ramon (born in 1988), was killed when the F-16A fighter aircraft he was piloting crashed in the West Bank, not far from the city of Hebron. It was three months after his graduation from the Air Force Academy with high honors when this incident occurred. President Shimon Peres of Israel presented him with his pilot’s badge at that time.
A Position in the Air Force
Ilan Ramon became a fighter pilot after he graduated from the aviation school in 1974. His basic training and operational experience on the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and Dassault Mirage III aircraft spanned the years 1976–1980. Following this, in 1980, Ramon was among the first Israeli pilots to train and operate the F-16A/B fighter jet out of Hill Air Force Base in Utah, when the Israeli Air Force formed its first F-16A/B unit.
The arrival of these cutting-edge crafts was crucial to the success of the 1981 Israeli air force operation known as Operation Opera. From 1981 until 1983, Ramon officially represented the F-16 squadron. In 1982, he served in the First Lebanon War, also known as Operation Peace for Galilee.
Operation Opera
To destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor being built at Osirak, which was roughly 9 miles (15 km) west of the heart of Baghdad, the Israeli Air Force carried out Operation Opera, a highly classified and difficult operation. Based on data gathered by intelligence agencies, Israel was concerned that Saddam Hussein might use the reactor to develop nuclear weapons.
Prime Minister Menachem Begin opted for a military response after diplomatic efforts failed, and the jeopardy has been called “the greatest threat to the existence of the Jewish people since Auschwitz.”
“They accomplished something that many thought was impossible. Ramon only had the rank of captain at the time, but we knew he was the perfect man for the event. He was very cold-blooded.”
General Amos Yadlin reflects on Operation Opera
Ilan Ramon, who was just 26 at the time, was the operation’s youngest participant and ultimately rose to the rank of captain. To shield the “Nec” bomber formation and disrupt the enemy’s radar, a total of 8 F-16A “Nec” aircraft and 6 escort F-15A “Baz” aircraft were sent.
On Sunday, June 7, 1981, at 3:55 p.m. local time in Israel, the aircraft lifted off from Etzion Air Base in the Sinai Desert. Their 1,000-mile (1,610 km) journey did not follow the most efficient and direct path via Jordan, but rather did take a detour southward through less patrolled desert regions of Saudi Arabia, and then arc northward through the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Aircraft strikes hit their objectives at Israeli midnight. The late afternoon was selected for the assault for two reasons: the aircraft would have the sun at their backs as they swooped in (dazzling any possible enemies), and the likelihood of anybody being at the facility at that time would be low.
The aircraft, which had to fly low over the desert due to the radars, eventually reached an altitude of 9,850 feet (3,000 m) just before they hit their objective. The “Nec” aircraft flipped over and raced towards the target at an angle of roughly 35 degrees from the sun, traveling at a height of around 3,300 feet (1,000 m), where the pilots then gradually dropped their payload of two 2,000-pound (907 kg) bombs.
Fourteen of the sixteen unguided iron Mk.84 GPLD bombs probably reached their target, resulting in the entire destruction of the Iraqi reactor and its cooling system. As a secondary objective, the strike was meant to foil an undisclosed tunnel system for processing plutonium for military use.
Anti-aircraft fire met the planes when they turned around. Despite Iraq’s anti-aircraft capabilities, no Iraqi aircraft took off and no Israeli planes were shot down. After a successful mission, all planes landed safely back at Ramat David Air Base in the hills south of Haifa around 7:00 p.m. local time.
Commander
After earning his degree from Tel Aviv University, Ramon served as the 119th F-4 Phantom Squadron’s first deputy commander from 1988 until 1990. In 1990, he graduated from the commander course, and from 1990 to 1992, he led the 117th Fighter Attack Squadron. In the years between 1992 and 1994, he was promoted to head the division in charge of equipment. He became a colonel (Aluf Mishneh) in 1994 and remained at that level until 1998.
Ilan Ramon had almost 3,000 hours in the cockpit of an A-4 Skyhawk, Mirage III-C, or F-4 Phantom, and over 1,000 hours in an F-16, all during his time in the Air Force.
STS-107 Space Flight Mission
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and US President Bill Clinton signed an agreement on sustainable water usage, environmental preservation, and Israel’s involvement in NASA’s space shuttle program on December 11, 1995. The stated goal of the initiative was to have the United States prepare Israelis to take part in the program by becoming astronauts.
The Israel Space Agency (ISA) also decided that the mission’s payload specialist would be an Israeli astronaut who had received NASA’s approval. Colonel Ilan Ramon was the lucky winner back in 1997. He and his family had to relocate to Houston, Texas, USA, so that he could complete his training at the Johnson Space Center, which took 4.5 years.
On January 16, 2003, at 10:39 a.m. EST, Ilan Ramon took off into space aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia on Mission STS-107. Ramon was one of seven astronauts who took part in the trip; the others were Commander Richard Rick Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson, and Flight Specialists David M. Brown, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, and Michael P. Anderson.
Ilan Ramon made history by becoming Israel’s first astronaut and the first Israeli to go to space. On the other hand, he wasn’t the first Jew to do so; Judith Resnik, the first Jewish woman to fly into space, too, lost her life while serving in January 1986, when she was on her second voyage aboard the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after launching the STS-51-L mission. There were a total of five Jewish astronauts, including Jeffrey A. Hoffman, Ellen S. Baker, Jerome Apt, David Wolf, and Scott J. Horowitz, who had all gone into space after her but before Ramon.
Extraordinary safety precautions were taken since an Israeli astronaut was aboard. For instance, it was kept secret that the orbiter stage for the space shuttle Columbia was being built in a hangar at OPF. Also, an armored SWAT team guarded the shuttle as the crew members boarded.
“Israel looks very small from above (…) but that is precisely why it is quite calm and peaceful.”
Space Shuttle Columbia video conversation with Ilan Ramon
It would seem that Ilan Ramon, of all the crew members, gained the greatest notoriety on this trip. Before he left, there were heated discussions among rabbis regarding keeping kosher and Shabbat while in space. He made history by becoming the first astronaut to insist on a kosher diet and to celebrate the start of Shabbat with a kiddush. The Shema Yisrael prayer was being said as the shuttle passed over Jerusalem. The popularity of Ramon’s space mission skyrocketed in Israel, to the point that he became a hero to young Israelis; his likeness was displayed more often than that of the rapper Eminem on bedroom walls.
Ilan Ramon took numerous things with significant meanings for his space voyage. Israeli President Moshe Katsav also presented him with a microfilm copy of the Torah and a miniature Torah scroll recovered from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Katsav also gave him a mezuzah, the Jewish prayer box traditionally hung on the doorpost. There was barbed wire around it, a visual representation of concentration camps. He also brought some personal artifacts, including letters from his brother Gadi and his son Assaf, which he read for the first time in space. His wife, Rona, sent him four poems.
What served as the most significant thing for Ramon that he brought into space was a drawing by a Jewish youngster from Prague named Petr Ginz. During World War II, Petr Ginz, at 14 years old, was arrested for being Jewish and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Yad Vashem Memorial to the Victims and Heroes of the Holocaust requested this commemoration.
There Petr Ginz co-founded the literary magazine Vedem with a group of friends. The drawing that Ilan Ramon took into space was created by the little Petr before he was sent to Theresienstadt. He, like Jules Verne, was captivated by space and attempted to illustrate what he imagined Earth might look like from the Moon. He was among those who were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where many members of Ramon’s family also died.
Scientific Experiments Conducted by Ilan Ramon
STS-107 was a scientific mission for the Space Shuttle Columbia. Spacehab was installed in the shuttle’s hold in order to conduct experiments in microgravity. Due to its ability to combine two smaller modules into one bigger one, the Spacehab DRM (“Double Research Module”) was selected for the mission. Over the course of the mission’s sixteen days, scientists conducted more than eighty separate tests.
MEIDEX (short for Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, also known as the Mediterranean Dust Experiment) was Ilan Ramon’s primary experiment while in space. MEIDEX was an Israeli initiative at Tel Aviv University that employed DPZ remote sensing to examine desert aerosols. Mission STS-107’s MEIDEX experiment aimed to standardize the key remote sensing techniques for desert aerosols. Measurements were taken both in the air and on the ground.
Experiment findings were expected to significantly contribute to current and future research on geographic variations in the optical, physical, and chemical properties of desert aerosols. The MEIDEX experiment used a multispectral camera to take readings at six distinct wavelength ranges, from ultraviolet (UV) to infrared (IR), to determine how much light desert particles scatter. The research scope included both the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic coast of the Sahara.
Ilan Ramon, on the other hand, wasn’t your usual payload specialist since he was engaged in a wide variety of research and had substantial training. “Ilan is fully integrated in all aspects of the mission,” remarked Crew Commander Richard Rick Husband about him: “He is not a mere observer; he is a proper member of the crew in all respects. In my opinion, Ilan is much more than just an on-board specialist. He performed more experiments than anyone else on board. He has had a lot of training.”
To help while minimizing the negative effects of being in space, other experiments were randomly selected, such as the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Advanced Respiratory Monitoring System ARMS and the Israeli company Materna’s probiotic milk powder M-107 containing Bifidobacterium lactis BB-12.
Students from Haifa’s Ort Mackin School, for instance, conducted an experiment in which they saw cobalt chloride and calcium crystals develop in microgravity. During the journey, scientists also collected blood, saliva, urine, and adult stem cells to study their effects in microgravity after landing.
Disaster and Death
On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was planned to touch down on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center at 9:16 a.m. EST. The crew began the landing procedure at 8:03 a.m. EST. The space shuttle had reached Earth’s upper atmosphere and was being engulfed in a heated plasma field. When air molecules rubbed against the shuttle’s exterior, they generated plasma with a temperature much beyond 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000°C).
However, insulating panels provided shielding for the shuttle. The official time of entrance into the atmosphere was recorded as 8:44 a.m. EST. Everything was proceeding as expected at the moment. After five minutes, some sensors detected a moderate rise in temperature; after two minutes, more sensors picked up the same trend; and after some more time, the sensors began to lose data. The NASA control center paid special attention to the left landing gear tires when they lost pressure data. However, there was a pause in transmission while the situation was being confirmed.
According to radar data, the jet completely vanished a few seconds later. The left side separated right before the whole body fell apart. Columbia was flying at 3.4 mi/s and 39 miles (63 km) in altitude when the communication ended. All that was left in the path of the Space Shuttle Columbia was hot debris, which dispersed and fell in three different states in the United States, with the most falling in Texas.
The debris field was an ellipsoid with a radius of about 300 miles (500 km) and a diameter of around 60 miles (100 km). Immediately, efforts began to save the victims. However, none of the seven-man crew made it out alive.
On September 26, 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its preliminary findings. The inquiry determined that defective thermal insulation on the leading edge of the left wing, which had been destroyed during take-off, was the root cause of the accident. A huge piece of foam insulation detached from the external fuel tank and caused the accident.
During descent, the wing’s leading-edge rib was likely the first to be burned by the plasma that entered through the ensuing crack. Then the crack slowly grew larger as it burned through the wing’s internal partitions, exposing the wing’s skeleton. Aerodynamic forces were simultaneously tearing plates and debris away from the shuttle. The wing was then ripped off, and telemetry data on tire temperature and pressure was cut off. The Space Shuttle Columbia started to turn rapidly, contact was lost, and the vehicle was destroyed in the following seconds.
Reactions
As the descent of the Space Shuttle Columbia was being shown live on television, the world immediately mourned the death of its entire STS-107 crew. Ilan Ramon’s mother, who had severe Alzheimer’s disease at the time, was unaware of her son’s space journey, while his father, Eliezer Wolferman, was in an Israeli television studio during the descent.
The journalist was talking to Ramon’s father when the news of Columbia’s devastation came in. The father Eliezer kept whispering the same sentence, “I don’t have a son anymore,” and Ramon’s daughter Noa, who was five at the time, called her mother in Houston to ask, “Mom, how can a person die in space? After all, people die on Earth.”
The whole nation of Israel eagerly anticipated the return of its first astronaut, Ramon, from Cape Canaveral. Ramon was meant to disembark at the cabin carrying an Israeli flag once the shuttle landed at Cape Canaveral. It was supposed to be a landmark event. His people could finally stop worrying about terrorist attacks, the economy, and the possibility of war with Iraq for a moment. Instead, the country continued to lament another loss of life.
It was at 2:04 p.m. EST that President George W. Bush said, “My fellow Americans, this day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our country. At 9:00 a.m. this morning, Mission Control in Houston lost contact with our Space Shuttle Columbia. A short time later, debris was seen falling from the skies above Texas. The Columbia is lost; there are no survivors.”
Search and Burial
The bodies of the Columbia crew members were dispersed over a wide region beside the shuttle’s wreckage. Once located, they were subsequently identified by a comparison of DNA and dental data. The Americans were assisted in identifying the remains by a special Israeli team deployed by the Israel Defense Forces, which included members of the military rabbinate.
NASA notified Israeli authorities on February 5 that the body of Colonel Ilan Ramon had been identified, four days after the Columbia incident. The casket carrying Ramon’s body arrived in Israel on February 10. On the same day, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Moshe Katsav attended a state burial at an airfield close to Ben Gurion Airport. Ilan Ramon was laid to rest in Nahalal Moshav Cemetery the same day, with full military honors.
Awards and Distinctions
- Military decorations:
- Yom Kippur War (1973)
- Operation Peace for Galilee (1982)
- 1000 flight hours on F-16s (1992)
- Honors and medals:
- NASA Space Flight Medal
- NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal
- Congressional Space Medal of Honor (Ramon is the only non-US citizen to be awarded this honor)
- Chief of Staff Medal of Appreciation
Places and Institutions Named After Ilan Ramon
The following is a list of Ilan Ramon memorials and buildings.
- Asteroid 51828 Ilanramon.
- Ramon Hill, Columbia Hills, Mars.
In the United States
- Ramon Hall, Florida Institute of Technology, USA.
- Ilan Ramon AZA #380, Boulder, Colorado, United States
- Ilan Ramon BBYO #5378, Oviedo, Florida, United States
In Canada
- Ilan Ramon Boulevard, Vaughan, Ontario, Canada.
- Ilan Ramon Crescent, Cote St. Luc, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
- Ilan Ramon Avenue, Thornhill, Ontario, Canada.
In Israel
- Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba.
- Ramon Control Tower, Ben Gurion Airport.
- Ilan Ramon Elementary School, Netanya.
- Ramon Elementary School, Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut.
- Ramon High School, Hod HaSharon.
- Ilan Ramon Junior High School, Kokhav Ya’ir.
- Mitzpe Ilan is a settlement founded in the early 21st century near the town of Katzir-Harish.
- Ilan Ramon Emergency Center, Kaplan Medical Center, Rehovot.
- Ramon Park, Giv’at Shmuel.
- Ilan Ramon Park, space-themed playground, Beersheba.
