The shuttle came down, with all seven on board, and the goal was as ancient as the human race: home.

In the 9th century B.C., it did not matter what had happened to Odysseus and his warriors as they battled through the fierce world. What mattered was going home. What mattered to Odysseus was to return to his wife, Penelope. What mattered was to hear your own language, to see familiar streets and terrain, to embrace those you loved. To feast again on life, and not killing. To be home.

And here they came: Rick Husband and William McCool, David Brown and Michael Anderson, Ilan Roman and Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chawla. Seven human beings who had gone to places where almost none of us could ever go. How hard it is now to look at any of them. Their faces alone seem to be the best of the human race.

Anderson was African-American, in charge of scientific experiments on the space shuttle Columbia. We can't ever know how much imagination, will, intelligence and hard work it took for him to soar into the space between Earth and the stars. What did he tell his two children about the mission of his life, and what it meant to them, too? What did his death tell us all?

Looking at him, I flashed to a day in 1947, long before Anderson was born, and I was a boy up in the bleachers of a lost ballpark, and a man named Robinson was rounding third, heading for home.

A long journey into space

There is the lovely smiling face of Kalpana Chawla, 41, an immigrant, a naturalized citizen of the United States who had begun her long human journey in India. I do not know this for fact, but I am certain that when she was a young girl, she read Ray Bradbury, our great poet of other worlds, and envisioned herself out there beyond the pull of the Earth. She must have imagined the silent gulfs of space before she ever moved through them, up there beyond poverty and disease and bigotry and war.

There on a Sunday morning she is in front of us on videotape, talking before the launch to Miles O'Brien of CNN. She is smiling and delighted. Before her lies adventure. Before her lies a voyage that will add to the knowledge and intelligence of the human race. Who would not embrace her? What old man, soured by the horrors of the world, would not want her as a daughter?

And there is Laurel Clark, who left behind an 8-year-old son and was descending again to the Earth to go to that boy and feast with him. She is grinning, pleased, playful in the weightless atmosphere of the shuttle. She gets a wakeup call on the final morning and Houston plays a piper's tune.

It's called "Scotland the Brave," but all of us descended from the brave, mad Celts have always claimed it for our own. We have heard it played defiantly at ten thousand funerals and even more parades. The tune, which defies death itself, plays as she gazes at the camera and grins - for Laurel Clark is going home.

There, too, are William McCool and David Brown and Rick Husband: smiling in life, handsome, confident, human beings who believed in knowledge and the verification of beliefs through experiment. McCool and Husband were descending to embrace children and wives. Brown, who was single, would see friends and surely make them laugh, and explain what the voyage would tell human beings about the healing arts, for he was a surgeon.

On a mission for his people

And there among them, too, was Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. He was a nonpracticing Jew who brought matzo with him for the flight and celebrated the Sabbath in space with a reading of the Kaddish service.

He carried, too, a tiny palm-sized Torah scroll that came from the secret bar mitzvah in a Nazi camp of a boy who became a leading Israeli scientist, and one of Ramon's teachers. The rabbi who performed the service died. Almost 60 years later, the small Torah traveled with Ramon into the heavens.

Ramon, the son of a woman who had survived Auschwitz, also carried with him a drawing made by a 14-year-old named Peter Ginz. It was a drawing of the Earth as the boy imagined it would look from the moon. The boy never made it back to his own home; Peter Ginz died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Ilan Ramon was, as we have all now seen, a confident, smiling man, husband, father of four children (aged 6 to 14). He moved with the modest ease of a man who had risked his life many times before, in the dangerous skies over the Mideast.

He was, in fact, one of the men who destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. And there he was, in one of the old interviews, explaining that, yes, he was there for Israel and Jews everywhere, but he was also there for all the people of the Mideast, "for all of our neighbors."

In each of his interviews, Ramon seemed pleased to be up above the unhappy Earth, above a world where suicide bombers murder strangers in the name of idealistic abstractions.

"He was so happy, he said he didn't want to come back to Earth," Ilan's father said. "And he didn't come back to Earth ..."

In spite of a few wretched fools who claim that Allah is exulting in this calamity, Earth now celebrates Ilan Ramon, and the six brave human beings who were with him at the end. All had seen the bad parts of the planet: in war, or while walking the streets of wrecked towns, or in the wards of hospitals, or in the slums of great cities. Each of them had the rarest of all chances to look back upon the beautiful blue planet that has survived so much outrage and injury.

"Hello from above our magnificent planet Earth," Laurel Clark E-mailed a group of friends, from out there, surrounded by what Bradbury called "the dark velocities." And she added, with a modest sense of wonder: "I have seen my 'friend' Orion several times ..."

These seven voyagers will surely not be the last to move out beyond the Earth, trying to solve the mysteries of the universe - and of Earth itself. Others are surely waiting to make Orion a friend of us all. May all of them make it home.