Astronaut's Mother Dies While Son in Space

December 20, 2007— -- Rose Tani, whose son Dan is currently in orbit as an astronaut on the International Space Station, was killed Wednesday when her car was hit by a train near her home in Lombard, Ill., outside Chicago.

Police said Ms. Tani, 90, was trying to drive around a stopped school bus at a railroad crossing when her car was hit by a commuter train. She was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

NASA said mission control in Houston had told Dan Tani of his mother's death.

Astronaut Tani, who left for orbit on Oct. 23, must, barring a change of plans, remain in space for now. While there is a three-seat Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked to the space station at all times in case an emergency forces the crew to return to Earth, Tani was scheduled to come home on the space shuttle Atlantis this month.

That mission was delayed by a faulty fuel sensor, and engineers are trying to figure out how to fix it. Under current plans, Atlantis will be launched no earlier than Jan. 10 -- if the sensor problem can be fixed by then.

"The entire NASA family grieves with Dan on the unexpected loss of his mother yesterday," Michael Coats, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement. "We will work to provide Dan and his family with any assistance that they need during this difficult time."

NASA has, in the past, contemplated what to do if there was bad news back home while an astronaut was on a long-duration space flight. Several astronauts on previous space station flights have said, before flight, that if something happened they would rather not know, since they would not be able to do anything about it.

One unavoidable exception, though it did not involve a family member, came on Sept. 11, 2001. Astronaut Frank Culbertson and two Russian crew mates were on board the space station when the terrorist attacks took place that morning.

"We're having a bad day down here on Earth," a mission manager in Houston radioed Culbertson. As it happened, the space station was going to pass over New York on its next orbit, and the astronauts were able to take pictures of the smoke plume created by the fire at the World Trade Center.

"Tears don't flow the same in space," he later said. On Sept. 12 he learned that one of the pilots of the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, Charles Burlingame, had been a classmate of his at the U.S. Naval Academy.