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]