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