David Low, a NASA astronaut who served on three space shuttle missions before becoming a space industry executive, died Saturday of colon cancer at Reston Hospital Center in Virginia. He was 52.
During his 12 years as an astronaut, he logged more than 714 hours in space while circling the Earth more than 540 times.
In June 1993, Mr. Low was payload commander aboard the Endeavour, launched to recover the free-flying European Retrievable Carrier. Four days into the mission, his third spaceflight, Mr. Low and fellow astronaut Peter “Jeff” Wisoff ventured outside the spacecraft, where they worked for five hours and 50 minutes.
On his first flight into space aboard the space shuttle Columbia three years earlier, Mr. Low carried with him a pair of 159-year-old socks that had belonged to Ezra Cornell, founder of the university that bears his name. (Mr. Low had received a master’s degree at Cornell.)
Mr. Low said he had a primary objective on his first flight: “I’ll be very, very happy if we can get the wheels stopped and I haven’t screwed anything up.”
Mr. Low’s father, George Low, was the NASA director behind the Gemini and Apollo missions. The elder Low died in 1984.
“He’s still the yardstick that I use to measure most things in life,” his son said in a 1990 interview, “from how you handle yourself to how you treat other people.”
Mr. Low was born in Cleveland and, as a sister recalled, declared to family members at age 9 that he would be an astronaut.
From 1980 to 1984, he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where he was involved in preliminary planning for several planetary space probes.
He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1984 and at 28 was the youngest in his class. He served as the spacecraft communicator, or “capcom,” for three shuttle missions, including the first flight after the loss of the Challenger in 1986.
On his first spaceflight — the one with the antique socks stowed aboard — he helped retrieve a science satellite called the Long Duration Exposure Facility.
Mr. Low worked for NASA for three years after his last flight. He joined Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences Corp. in 1996.
