Every time there's a plane crash I think of my brother, Greg.
 

He was killed on a sunny October morning in 1980 at Ellington Field near Houston as he piloted an F-101 fighter jet for the Texas Air National Guard.
 

The runway at Ellington Field is the same strip of concrete that the astronauts use when they fly from NASA's adjacent Johnson Space Center to Cape Canaveral, where they ultimately board the Shuttle on a journey to The Heavens.
 

Greg wasn't an astronaut, but he was a hero.
 

On his fateful ascent into the Texas sky, a fuel line leak caused his jet's engines to flameout seconds after takeoff. Four hundred feet in the air, Greg and his navigator in the back seat, Jerry, had to make a nearly-instantaneous decision.
 

While reflex and training told them to eject immediately, there was another critical consideration: a housing development and schoolyard lie in the direct flight path of the crippled, sputtering jet.
 

The decision took less than a second, but it would affect many lives forever.
 

Not only the lives of Greg and Jerry and their families, but the innocent men, women and children who were oblivious to the lethal drama playing out in the morning sky above them.
 

Instead of ejecting and sending the pilotless jet on a collision course with the neighborhood below, Greg pulled the jet sharply to the left, into an open field where it crashed, exploded and burned hundreds of yards away from the neighborhood.
 

Greg was 32-years-old and left behind a wife, a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
 

To paraphrase James Taylor, sweet dreams and flying machines were in pieces on the ground.
 

Which brings me to Saturday morning, February 1st 2003.
 

It's not just plane crashes that bring my brother Greg to mind. It's anytime young people in their prime act heroically and are taken from this world long before they should have been.
 

The sudden, yet heroic death of the Columbia astronauts took me back to that day and that runway and that smoldering wreckage in that field in 1980.
 

Like the astronauts, Greg was living his dream. He always wanted to fly and once he flew, he always wanted to be a fighter pilot. By his final mortal flight, Greg had reached the pinnacle of his lifelong ambitions. He was the man he had always dreamed of becoming, living the life he had always wanted.
 

The young, vibrant astronauts of Columbia had certainly reached the summit of their dreams as well.
 

The six American astronauts also left their suburban Houston homes for a final time from the same runway at Ellington Field and were joined by the first Israeli astronaut.
 

Their Earthly flight lasted a little longer than Greg's. To Cape Canaveral, to Columbia and then into orbit on January 16th.
 

They would live and dream another 16 days after leaving Planet Earth.
 

And then, in the blink of an eye… they were gone.
 

Not only could I distantly empathize with the sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers of the fallen astronauts, but something else struck me.
 

As awful as we may regard the tragic deaths of the astronauts that Saturday morning, they were truly blessed.
 

They were blessed with a vision before they shed this mortal coil.
 

A vision of a beautiful bluish sphere, with no boundaries drawn on the landmasses separating nation from warring nation.
 

A vision of the sun and the stars and the moon and the firmament that no human eyes witnessed before their lifetimes and few human eyes will ever behold.
 

A vision of men and women from diverse corners of the globe working together in a common goal to increase Mankind's knowledge of his (and her) place in the Cosmos.
 

There are worse ways to die than to reach your highest height and touch your ultimate dream and then blow out from "the heavens" to Heaven in the blink of an eye.
 

While it may seem horrific from our earthbound perspective, the true reality may very well be sublime and incomprehensibly blissful from their perspective.
 

I like to think that it is.