High Desert Teacher Showed Her Students How to Track Columbia
By Vince Lavato/Staff Writer
Apple Valley- Patty and Howard Rifkin were up before dawn Thursday in the yard of their Apple Valley home to track the space shuttle Columbia across the vast desert sky black as ink and spangled with silver stars.
Since its launch Jan. 16, the shuttle had been visible at night as it orbited about 18 degrees above the north-northwest ho rizon in San Bernardino County.
"You can't see the shuttle itself,' said Patty Rifkin, who teaches an elective space exploration class at the Lewis Center for Academic Excellence charter school in Apple Valley.
"You can see the lights of the shuttle. It looks like a little light dot in the sky, like a star except it's moving so fast. We watched it for about two minutes about a quarter of the way up the sky. We estimated it traveled about 600 miles in that span.'
She was so excited that she showed her math and space students Friday how they could track the shuttle Saturday morning.
But minutes after it passed over the county, there was no space shuttle. The shuttle, which orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, exploded over Texas, killing the crew of seven, just 16 minutes before it was supposed to land.
"I was kind of shocked,' said Rifkin, who attended space courses for four days at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in July. She even got to visit Mission Control, where she saw full-sized mock-ups of equipment the astronauts train in.
"On Friday I was giving students the time and angle to look in the sky to see the shuttle,' she said. "I hoped to get some of them excited enough to watch. And I was hoping on Monday to find out if any of them worked to see if they could spot it.'
Rifkin, who lived in Upland and taught at Etiwanda Intermediate School before moving to Apple Valley about two years ago, has been interested in space for years and hopes the tragedy does not sidetrack the shuttle program.\
Since the shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch in 1986, "NASA doesn't let anybody go up who's not a member of the military,' Rifkin said. "Since this happened they won't open it up to commercial travel any time soon.' She was also interested in reports of companies such as Kelly Space in San Bernardino putting civilians into space. " I've seen some articles that there are companies working with that intent to have commercial or private ways to get into space,' she said.
Rifkin said she accessed a Web site, www.spaceflight.com , to get time and horizon coordinates for the shuttle based on where she was watching. Sun correspondent Michelle Lovato contributed to this report. High Desert teacher saw part of shuttle's last orbit
Used with permission by San Bernardino Sun Newspaper, 2003