NASA remembers fatal flight.

The Miami Herald Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Feb. 2--CAPE CANAVERAL -- White, red and purple carnations dangled on fences. Flags flew at half-staff. Eyes gazed at the ground with sorrow and then to the sky with purpose.

Relatives of the dead and friends of the space program gathered Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center and lamented the loss exactly two years earlier of the seven astronauts of shuttle Columbia, glancing backward at tragedy but also focusing on the task ahead: returning shuttle astronauts to space by June.

"The Columbia Seven gave meaning to their lives by what they accomplished in space . . . ," Winston Scott, a former astronaut and Miami native, said during a …