Archives for February 2003

The second lesson.

I was going to get up and watch the Shuttle re-enter the atmosphere this morning, but forgot to set the alarm.

Instead, a few minutes ago, I got a call from my sister, whose voice sounded just like it did when she called before dawn on September 11, 2001.

Now I’m sitting here with a six year old boy who loves aviation and space travel, talking about what happened to Columbia, and how something so adventurous and wonderful could end so badly.

It’s been almost exactly seventeen years since the last Shuttle disaster. Not long afterwards I wrote Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy.

I’m sure we’ll learn from this one too.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Andrew Juby: “My roommate has access to Goddard Space Flight Center’s Orbital Information group server. He can pull up data on just about any non-classified orbiting object. We checked it this morning and pulled up some data on Columbia, and ran it by the aerospace major across the hall. It appears that at about 2 or 3AM, as Columbia was into its descent, it pulled up.” [Scripting News]

Shuttle Breaks up on reentry – Here’s the report from Instapundit, with links to useful information.  If you want to see footage of the reentry you can tune into CNN, but the analysis is pretty sparse at this point (they’re interviewing fools from Texas who claim to have seen strange things).  Better off sticking to Instapundit if you want sober analysis.  Forget, terrorism.  This will wind up being the result of structural failure, and I’ll bet it is related to a failure of the heat tile system.  Of course, trained investigators will have their work cut out for them.  The Shuttle broke up at 200,000 feet while travelling 12,000 miles per hour, which means that the debris field is going to be very, very large.

The best thing for us to do is to pray for the crew and their family members.  [Ernie the Attorney]

Oh No. There’s no other official news other than this, but it sounds like it did explode in entry. It breaks my heart because if there’s one thing this country does well, it is our exploration of space. It is the very best of us. [Burningbird]

A space shuttle landing would be great to see.  From what I understand it comes down like a controlled brick with a massive rate of descent:

During the final approach, the commander steepens the angle of descent to minus 20 degrees (almost seven times steeper than the descent of a commercial airliner).  For more go here…

I have seen two launches as close as you are allowed to be, and they were something I would not have missed for the world.  It’s something everybody needs to do, at least once. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]