You know, I said that today’s Fox column was an exclusive, and that you hadn’t read it here, but a lot of it was regurgitated posts. Here’s one bit for my readers, who never made it to the Fox site, that wasn’t.

Today’s scheduled Shuttle launch carried, for the first time, an Israeli astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon. Israel has long had their own launch capability, but they are constrained by their geography to only launch into retrograde orbits (that is, east to west orbits, against the earth’s rotation), and they don’t have a manned launch capability. So in many ways, this is a significant milestone for them.

It’s a poignant one as well.

Col. Ramon’s mother is a survivor of Auschwitz, and many of his other relatives died there. In commemoration of all of the victims of that grim chapter of the last century, he’s going to take some space art along with him. It’s a haunting picture, a moonscape, prescient of the pictures that the Apollo astronauts would take with cameras a couple decades later. It was drawn by a 14-year old boy, Petr Ginz, who died in the camp, never to see man walk on the moon, or even launch a satellite. It’s a tribute to the unquenchable imagination of a child, who could escape the unimaginable horror of daily existence with dreams of other, perhaps happier worlds.

And of course, as a reminder of the current times, as the article points out, some who are unhappy with Israel’s present actions in the Middle East (and perhaps unhappy with the very existence of Israel as a state, or who may even regret that Hitler didn’t finish the job), are equally unhappy with NASA’s decision (made several years ago) to take an Israeli into space. While no specific threats have been received, security for the launch remained high. Sadly, the demons in humanity that finally did quench young Petr’s dreams of space, permanently, continue to follow us into the 21st Century.

[And thanks to Mark Whittington for the tip]