The first time, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on liftoff 17 years ago, Bailey had just been selected by the U.S. Army to work as a science officer in the astronaut office at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. He'd met the astronauts who perished, and he took up his new post at a grim NASA exactly one month to the day after Challenger's doomed flight.

The second time was Saturday morning, when news that space shuttle Columbia broke apart as it streaked back to Earth reached Bailey's North Fork Road home. The softspoken geology professor, who returned to Alaska because of his passion for glaciers, was getting ready to watch his daughter Sara play in the basketball tournament at nearby Nikolaevsk School.

While Bailey is far removed from the intense world of NASA, this tragedy hit hard, he said, because he knew what was going on in the space agency's offices and control rooms, among the tight-knit core of scientists and astronauts in Florida and Texas.

"I can still visualize so clearly the issues everyone at NASA was dealing with after Challenger," Bailey said Saturday evening. "For those who are in the astronaut program now, their best way to grieve is to get back to working really hard to put things right and get back into space."

Despite their grief in the wake of Challenger, Bailey said, the NASA community wholly accepted that the risks associated with space flight are worth taking.

They were risks Bailey himself once agreed to take.

After working at Johnson Space Center for two years, and following an interim stint teaching at West Point, Bailey was given his chance at space flight. In 1990, the army and NASA selected him to be a payload specialist astronaut. Bailey, a geology expert, was assigned to launch in a space shuttle and carry out a military project called Terrageode. The geology project never made it onto a shuttle manifest, and it was eventually dropped altogether.

Nonetheless, Bailey said, he considers himself lucky to have gotten as close to space as he did -- his astronaut training got far enough along that he did a number of the high-altitude parabolic flights used to simulate weightlessness.

The fact that the desire to be an astronaut and see outer space is now such a universal dream for the world's children seems to humble Bailey.

"It was a great experience being associated with the space program," he said. "When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a satellite. Never in my dreams would I have thought it possible" that human beings would travel into space.

Though he is not likely to be heard boasting about his NASA past, when he's not teaching geology or astronomy at Kachemak Bay College, the 55-year-old Bailey does occasionally share his near-space experience with children at local schools.

On Saturday, Bailey, who runs the clock for Nikolaevsk basketball games, brought a couple of space shuttle pictures and an informative printout to the school so that kids there might have a better understanding of the tragedy.

Prior to the singing of the national anthem, Bailey asked the crowd to rise and observe a moment of silence in honor of the seven astronauts who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia.

Nikolaevsk School Principal Terry Martin said it was a poignant moment, given Bailey's history with NASA.

"Who would guess there's a former astronaut living on the North Fork?" Martin said.

Sepp Jannotta can be reached at sjannotta@homer news.com.