If you desire to love God, love thy fellow-men. In them you can see the image and likeness of God. If you are eager to serve God, serve mankind. Renounce the self in the Self of God. When the aerial mariner steers his airship skyward, little by little the disharmony and incongruity of the world of matter are lost, and before his astonished vision he sees widespread the wonderful panorama of God’s creation. Likewise when the student of the path of Reality has attained to the loftiest summit of divine love, he will not look upon the ugliness and misery of mankind; he will not observe any differences; be will not see any racial and patriotic differences; but he will look upon humanity with the glorified vision of a seer and a prophet. Let us all strive that we may attain to this highest pinnacle of ideal and spiritual life. – Abdu’l-Baha, Star of the West, Volume 5, p. 138.

This quote, one of my own personal favorites from the Baha’i teachings, also appealed to the Baha’i astronaut Ronald McNair. You can probably see why. Ron saw “the wonderful panorama of God’s creation” on his first mission into space aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle in February of 1984, while “steering his airship skyward.” On that mission, Ron—the second African American and the first Baha’i to fly in space—experienced an honor reserved for very few human beings. He got to see the Earth from afar. He even coined a poetic word picture for that experience, later describing our planet as “a tear-drop of green.”

I think Ron meant, when he used the phrase, that as one growing human community, our shared pain and pleasure could unite us rather than divide us. After his first mission he told everyone that being in space gave him a unique perspective few people would ever have the privilege of seeing; that from those heights he could envision not only a unified humanity but God’s entire human creation, all on a tiny dot floating in the dark void. Ron often said he only saw one planet from space—ours.

Ron loved that vision. Two years later, on his way to see it again, he died on that same shuttle, the Challenger. His second voyage into space ended when the Challenger exploded nine miles above the Earth on January 28, 1986, killing all six astronauts aboard, and one civilian, a teacher named Christa McAuliffe.

As a physicist and an astronaut, Ron McNair believed what Abdu’l-Baha said, that the best way to serve God was to serve humanity. Ron felt that his service to humanity–space exploration–could not only bring us enormous technical and scientific knowledge, but that it could speak to our souls, to our continuous quest for discovery, for peace, for unity, for love. He gave his life in that noble pursuit. Ron McNair—astronaut, scholar, husband, father, scientist, servant of humanity, Baha’i, and a guy who could play a really mean saxophone—loved the light: