His dream will be partly realized when Colonel Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut, goes into space aboard the shuttle Columbia, scheduled for liftoff Jan. 16, accompanied by Ginz's "Moon Landscape". Col. Ramon is the son of a Holocaust survivor and will carry the 8"x11" drawing in his personal gear.

Peter's drawing is on loan from Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial. "It's a drawing of Peter as he imagined himself looking at Earth from the Moon," said Ramon, 48. "I really feel I'm taking his imagination and kind of fulfilling his wish of being here."

NASA is aware that a shuttle lift-off is already a high profile target for terrorists and the presence of an Israeli astronaut on board raises the stakes. While declining to discuss specific measures taken, NASA has tightened security significantly since the 9/11/2002 attacks. Fighter jets patrol the sky for every launch. The pilot of a small plane that strayed into the no-fly zone over the launch complex last April was escorted to a nearby airport and interrogated. NASA will not announce the exact lift-off time until 24 hours before.

The astronauts are more concerned about such prosaic issues as mechanical problems. The mission was scheduled for last July, when cracks were found the fuel lines of Columbia and two other orbiters. When the cracks were repaired, the mission was rescheduled for early this year.

Ramon earned a degree in electronics and computer science from Tel Aviv University. He is also a veteran of the Israeli military. He moved to Houston, along with his wife and four children, joining NASA's astronaut class of 1998. Ramon, a payload specialist, will focus on an Israeli-designed experiment that uses a multispectrum camera to study the impact of dust and other contaminants on Earth's weather and ecology.

While the first Israeli to go aloft, Ramon is not the first Middle Easterner to go up. A Saudi prince flew a mission in 1985, helping with the release of an Arab communications satellite.

Mike Williams, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1/12/2003, pg. B-1 and B-5