Oh no! Not again!
What a shame. The breakup of the Shuttle Columbia this morning isn’t quite as much of a shock as Challenger, but it’s still a terrible, terrible thing. I found out about it from a post on Curious Frog, but you can probably read about it on damned near every web site in the world by now.
I’ve basically followed the space program my entire life. Men landed on the moon for the first time ten days before my sixth birthday. The first moon buggy, which went up with Apollo 15, was used for the first time on my birthday a couple of years later. I’ve always found space flight fascinating, as have many people my age. There was something magical about it when I was a kid, and I’ve certainly kept up my interest since then.
When Challenger exploded in 1986, I was living in State College, Pennsylvania, in the year after I graduated from college. My housemate woke me that morning to tell me what had happened. As I shook the sleep from my eyes, my first reaction was "but that’s not supposed to happen. The space shuttle can’t explode." This time, I suppose it was more "oh no, not again...."
There’s not much to add, I suppose. I found it interesting that the debris trail from the shuttle apparently showed up on weather radar this morning. If nothing else is clear, it’s that space flight is still the dangerous, daring adventure that so captivated me 30-plus years ago.
Posted at 2:00 PM