Ellison Onizuka 1946-1986

He became an instant hero to both Hawaiians and Japanese Americans last January as the first member of either group to fly in space. Ellison Onizuka was a mission specialist on last year’s classified military flight of Discovery, but he was perhaps most appreciated among colleagues for his gentle, unassuming manner. Describing one of the tasks he was to perform on Challenger, to film Halley’s comet with a hand-held camera, he remarked with typical understatement, “I’ll be looking at Halley’s comet. They tell me I’ll have one of the best views around.”

The grandson of Japanese immigrants, Onizuka grew up in the village of Kealakekua, on the Kona coast of Hawaii island. As a boy, he worked in the island’s rich coffee fields, but his mind was on the stars, which he liked to examine through a telescope at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. The oldest of four children, Onizuka was a star athlete, an honor student and an Eagle Scout. He studied aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees. He then spent eight years as a test pilot and flight engineer with the Air Force. Onizuka taught courses at the elite Air Force test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in California before joining NASA as an astronaut candidate in 1978.

Onizuka, 41, lived with his wife and their two children in Houston. But wherever he went, he kept memories and icons of his past. Before his first space flight, he presented the Mission Control staff with coffee beans and macadamia nuts from Hawaii. For last week’s flight, he persuaded the staff to let him affix a University of Colorado emblem on a satellite that was to track Halley’s comet. Onizuka also brought along his college ring. “He wears it whenever he flies,” said his wife. Several years ago he visited his family’s ancestral gravesite in Japan. The elderly priest of the Buddhist temple where the remains of Onizuka’s ancestors are kept remembered saying goodbye to Onizuka. The astronaut, he said, promised to return after completing a shuttle mission.

After last week’s tragedy, his 72-year-old mother Matsue Onizuka wistfully recalled her son’s dream. “Ellison always had it in his mind to become an astronaut but was too embarrassed to tell anyone,” she said. “When he was growing up, there were no Asian astronauts, no black astronauts, just white ones. His dream seemed too big.” One dream was to continue traveling in space as long as he could. “There’s no age cutoff for astronauts,” he used to say.

Onizuka often returned to visit his mother on the slopes of Hawaii island’s Mount Hualalai, where she runs a general store near the village of Holualoa. Last week she showed reporters the wooden frame he had built to hold the mailboxes across the road. “His daughter Janelle, who was then about six, was afraid her father would be hit by a car,” she recalled. “So they made a sign that said DANGER. MAN AT WORK. She stood out there holding the sign, and I chuckle every time I think about it.” Mrs. Onizuka added, “He did a good job on the frame. It’s going to last a long time.”