When the Orion spacecraft lifted off April 1, four astronauts were aboard — but for the families of dozens of workers who died before the launch, the mission carried something else: the weight of those who would never see it fly.
One of them was Rebecca Kocher of Littleton.
Kocher, 58, died suddenly in December, less than four months before the Artemis II mission the Coloradan had spent nearly a decade helping to build. She had been receiving treatment for cancer.
“She put a lot of her life into this program,” said her husband Fred Kocher, who also worked on the mission…