CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A month after the most devastating terrorist attacks ever to take place on U.S. soil, NASA announced plans to launch thousands of American flags into orbit and then deliver them to the families of victims and survivors.
Packed aboard shuttle Endeavour when it takes off for the International Space Station in late November will be 10,000 U.S. flags, each about the size of a postcard.
Mounted on memorial certificates after the ship's return to Earth, the flags then will be distributed to those who lost family members in the hijacked airliner crashes in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
What's more, firehouses and police precincts that responded to the Sept. 11 attacks also will receive flags flown into space aboard the shuttle.
"Everyone around the agency has been trying to find something to do to honor the people who were killed and who were injured," said Bob Jacobs, a spokesman for NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
"Everyone has wanted to do a little something -- name a mission, fly a banner, do something -- and this was kind of agreed upon as a comprehensive agency effort to honor those affected by the attack."
NASA's so-called "Flags For Heroes and Families" campaign was officially announced Thursday, a day after agency chief Daniel Goldin presented the city of New York and New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani with an American flag carried into orbit on a previous shuttle mission.In an interview with Space News, Goldin said the flag campaign is the least the U.S. space agency can do to show solidarity in a time of national crisis.
"The shuttle carries 40,000 pounds," he said. "I figured we could make room for this cargo."
The attacks on the World Trade Center hit home for Goldin, a New York native known for wearing a black Bronx baseball cap to shuttle launches at Kennedy Space Center.
A few days after the attacks, Goldin said he received a phone call from his seven-year-old grandson Zachary, who told the NASA Administrator that he and his friends had collected $3,300 for New York's firefighters.
"This sort of thing is happening all across America," Goldin said. "My grandson doing it makes it even better."
The tradition of flying U.S. flags into space dates back to May 5, 1961, when the late astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to venture into space.
Students from Cocoa Beach High School here on Florida's Space Coast bought a flag at a local department store and convinced NASA officials to launch it along with Shepard.
The flag was rolled up and placed between cables routed behind the custom-fitted couch inside his Freedom 7 Mercury spacecraft, which was launched on a 15-minute jaunt into space and back.
Flag-toting shuttle Endeavour remains scheduled for launch Nov. 29 on a mission to ferry a new crew to the international station and then return with current outpost tenants Frank Culbertson, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin.
Endeavour, the so-called Expedition Three crew and the flags are due back at NASA's coastal Florida spaceport on Dec. 10.
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