Ilan Ramon   (born June 20, 1954, Ramat Gan, Israel—died Feb. 1,
2003, over Texas), Israeli pilot and astronaut who , was
Israel’s first astronaut and a payload specialist on the space
shuttle Columbia. Ramon, a graduate of the Israel Air Force
Flight School, was a fighter pilot in the 1973 Yom Kippur War
and in the 1982 military operations in Lebanon; he also took
part in the 1981 bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor. He was
selected for the U.S. astronaut program in 1998.