Ilan Ramon’s Diary
A Native American searching a Texas field after the crash of the Columbia space shuttle made an amazing discovery.
January 23, 2004 — JERUSALEM — Disintegrating pages of a diary that an Israeli astronaut wrote during the doomed Columbia space shuttle mission were miraculously found in Texas, it was disclosed yesterday.Ilan Ramon, an Israeli air force combat pilot, recorded his thoughts about the mission, starting from takeoff, in the handwritten journal.
But no one knew of its existence until a Native American scouring Texas fields for debris after the shuttle crash spotted the charred first page.
Neither the Native American, nor NASA officials, knew what the pages meant until they were shown to Ramon’s wife, Rona, who had remained in Houston after the Feb. 1 tragedy.
She immediately identified them as the handwriting, in Hebrew, of her husband.
“The existence of the diary was a stunning surprise,” said Naftali Gliksberg, who directed a documentary about the diary that will be aired in Israel on Tuesday, in advance of the first anniversary of the tragedy.
Only the first of the eight diary pages was legible, he told The Post. The others had been apparently bleached white during the shuttle’s plunge and 1,800-degree heat.
But Rona Ramon took them to the Israeli police department, which used optical scanners and, with the help of museum experts who decipher ancient manuscripts, they were able to reconstruct the pages.