As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don't know what they're saying.

Brown logged over 2700 flight hours with 1700 in high performance military aircraft. Working 24 hours a day in two alternating shifts the crew successfully conducted approximately 80 experiments. The Laurel B.

He died on his first spaceflight when the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107) disintegrated during orbital reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. David McDowell Brown (April 16 1956 – February 1 2003) was a United States Navy captain and a NASA astronaut. Brown became an astronaut in 1996 but had not served on a space mission prior to the Columbia disaster.