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The Singer and the Astronaut

Steve Green, the well-known Christian singer and recording artist, was supposed to perform at Colonial Baptist Church in Cary, North Carolina, on February 1, but something happened that Saturday morning that altered his concert plans.

At about 9 A.M. Eastern Time, Green's good friend Rick Husband, the commander of the space shuttle Columbia, and six fellow astronauts perished when their vehicle disintegrated over Texas, 16 minutes before it was scheduled to land.

Husband, 45, and Columbia's payload commander Michael Anderson, 43, were members of Grace Community Church, an interdenominational charismatic church in the Houston area.

"I knew that it wouldn't be the concert I had planned," Green told Christian Reader four days after the tragedy. "I knew it would be different. It became a concert dedicated to Rick. All of a sudden someone I had a friendship with had been taken in an extraordinary and very difficult way. The entire nation was not only focused, but consumed with the tragedy."

Green, 46, who met Husband during one of his concerts just months before the astronaut's first shuttle mission in May 1999, says the concert became "a time of reflection, mourning, reevaluation, quietness, and worship."

"I shared some things that night which I never thought I'd share publicly—things about Rick that have impacted my life," says Green, who was invited to sing by Husband at a reception for him before his 1999 and 2003 missions. "It wasn't just a memorial for Rick. It was lessons that I had learned from Rick's life and ways that he had challenged and pointed me towards Christ."

Green, who attended the memorial service at the Johnson Space Center in Houston for the astronauts, says Husband "very naturally but without hesitation gave a witness of his love for and faith in Christ."

"The team and crew he had command over was made up of people of different beliefs and backgrounds, and yet he did not hesitate to, in a very natural way, express his faith," Green explains.

He continues, "I was told by his spacesuit technician that right after they helped Rick put on his spacesuit and all the other astronauts were ready, they walked down a long hallway. But before they reached the media area, Rick stopped and prayed for each of his crew members. The technician said in all of his years at NASA, he had never seen a commander pray for his crew."

During Columbia's launch on January 16, which Green attended, he says he heard communications between Mission Control in Houston and Husband, which also told of Husband's bold, yet unassuming faith.

"It was T-minus one, or two minutes before takeoff, and someone from Mission Control made a comment about the launch being on a spectacular day," recalls Green, whose stories about Husband were chronicled in widely circulated e-mails by Christians who attended his February 1 concert.

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