By Stephen Collins '74

Emilie Archambeault '98 poses during a tour of a space shuttle simulator with astronaut David M. Brown. Brown, who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia, lectured at Colby in 1998 and maintained contact with Archambeault.

In February, as the nation mourned following the Space Shuttle Columbia catastrophe, a tendril of grief reached Mayflower Hill for former students and faculty who remembered David M. Brown, one of the seven crew members who perished. Brown came to Colby in March 1998, when he was still an astronaut trainee, and gave an extraordinary Spotlight Lecture about NASA's programs.

Emilie Archambeault '98 was in the audience. Then a senior economics and mathematics double major, she recalled recently that the lecture rekindled her own lifelong interest in space and astronomy. When the event ended she asked Brown to sign a poster. "He was just such a fantastic person; you felt like he just made a connection with the whole audience," she said.

The connection didn't end there. Over the intervening years Brown always replied to Archambeault's occasional e-mails. Once, when she was visiting a friend in Houston, she sent him a note to say she was in town, and before the day was out he invited her for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Johnson Space Center.

They visited Mission Control while the technicians there were talking to Lt. Col. Eileen M. Collins, the first woman commander of a space shuttle flight. Brown got Archambeault into the shuttle simulator and persuaded her to take the vacant commander's seat. Archambeault said the airline pilot on her flight back to Washington was awed--and envious--when she told him she had flown the shuttle simulator.

Having joined NASA in 1996, Brown's first space flight was the January 2003 Columbia mission. When the doomed Columbia took off from Cape Canaveral in January, Archambeault was there, one among a group of Brown's friends in the area reserved for invited guests. And after the chilling news found her in New York on Feb. 1, Archambeault said there was comfort in being able to talk with those same friends, who shared memories of what an extraordinary person Brown was.

Archambeault already had a job lined up with the Federal Reserve in Washington when she met Brown during her senior year. "If he had come during my freshman or sophomore year, I think I would have gone in a completely different direction," she said a week after the disaster. Now working in New York City, several career moves since her first job at the Fed, she said she can imagine working for NASA yet.

For more about Brown, visit www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/brown.html