For Jessica Bicks, this weekend was surreal.

She said she spent hours watching TV news, calling distant friends and thinking about the "family" of people who make space exploration their passion. The senior mechanical engineering major worked last spring and summer on a co-op at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Now, seeing the image of the space shuttle Columbia falling apart in the sky over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard, has made her sure of one thing.

"It makes me want to work there more," she said.

Saturday morning's disaster hit the close-knit corps of the space industry hard, but also brought the work of its astronauts and scientists back to the forefront, people with current and former ties to Penn State said.

Chester Ray, associate professor of medicine at Penn State's Hershey Medical Center, was in Florida near the Kennedy Space Center, watching the space agency's TV channel when communications with the crew failed a little after 9 a.m.

He was awaiting the return of one of the 80 international science experiments, which had been traveling aboard the spacecraft along with the six Americans and one Israeli. Eight rats had been living in a self-contained habitat on the shuttle since it took off on Jan. 16, and Ray's study was to have examined whether heart tissue is lost and whether blood vessels are damaged by spaceflight.

He said his thoughts immediately went to the human victims and their families, but the destruction of the experiment was also painful.

"Basically, we lost everything," Ray said.

Very few space-shuttle missions have been dedicated to the life sciences, he added, and the latest experiment -- with researchers from Texas A&M and Johns Hopkins universities -- was supposed to have been conducted two years ago.

Organizers for one of Penn State's largest NASA projects plan to launch a space observatory by the end of the year. The university received about $30 million from the three-year mission's budget of $163 million.

John Nousek, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, said the Columbia disaster will probably not affect the December liftoff of the Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, partly because an unmanned rocket will carry the satellite into orbit.

After the Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, it was more than two and a half years before another space shuttle lifted off. The latest crash may push back the beginning of other new projects, Nousek said.

As interest and funding for the U.S. space program have declined since the days of Apollo missions to the moon, NASA has had to make tradeoffs.

Spending more on developing new vehicles to get into space can mean spending less for the science inside the craft, and vice versa, Nousek said.

Flags in front of Old Main are flying at half-staff for the next few days in mourning, said university spokesman Steve MacCarthy.

Comparing the loss of Columbia with the last space shuttle disaster, MacCarthy said: "In some ways, the Challenger was a little more shocking. School kids all over the country were watching."

Much attention was devoted at the time to Christa McAuliffe, who was to have been the first schoolteacher in space. Dozens of missions have lifted off and landed safely in the 17 years since. "You sort of take it for granted," MacCarthy said. "The reality is it's dangerous work."

Bicks, who is looking forward to another co-op this summer at Johnson Space Center, said she hopes the disaster will "make the public more aware that this isn't routine. NASA does amazing things every day."

During her time in Houston, she got some advice that she remembered this weekend: "Make sure you talk to people who did work here during Challenger. They're usually the most driven," she recalled.

Bicks said Ron Dittemore, space shuttle program manager, said it well when he told reporters Saturday: "It's more than a job. This is a passion."