Two years ago, I (and much of the rest of the world) woke up to learn that Columbia had been destroyed on entry. Here were my immediate thoughts at the time (before we had much data to work with).

Take a look a Doug Jones's post of February 1, 2003.

I have the feeling he saw the moment when the Columbia's fate was sealed---a catastrophic failure in the wing and/or tiles---and that an important piece of Columbia debris now lies somewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California.

Harry,

The evidence from the onboard recorder pinned down the accident scenario in some detail. The data showed how the hot gas penetrated a hole in the RCC, then the front wing spar, into the interior of the wing.

It would have been nice to have that debris -- probably tiles and/or blankets, falling off as the glue holding them on heated and failed -- but in the end it wasn't necessary. And, that debris was just part of the unfolding of the at-that-point-inevitable disaster. The hole in the RCC existed even before entry (as confirmed by heating measurements in the cavity behind the RCC, during the earliest part of the entry sequence), so once the deorbit burn was done the orbiter and crew were doomed.

I remember very well what my "immediate thoughts" were on hearing about this. They were, "Oh, thank God!" I had slept in that morning. I was awakened by the phone ringing. It was a friend of mine, "Turn on your television, something terrible has happened!" Less than six months after the horrific attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. that sentence brought to mind visions of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people dead in who knew what sort of devilry. Thus when he told me that the Columbia had burned up on re-entry, even though I had formerly worked at JSC as a payload safety engineer and had shepherded her through more than one flight from my console in the mission evaluation room, my initial feeling was one of profound relief. Even tragedies are relative. Lets hope we can get flying again very soon.
Michael

Ummmm...Michael? It was a year and a half after September 11.

Quote: "Two years ago, I (and much of the rest of the world) woke up to learn that Columbia had been destroyed on entry."

I was actually woke up by the sonic boom from the orbiter breaking up. It was a peculiar sound in that it was hard to place. It didn't quite sound like a rifle report but more like someone had thown a brick or banged a sledge hammer into a large flat peice of sheet metal. The noise sounded very loud like someone had done this right outside my window. I got up and looked out and looked around (on the ground) and didn't see anything. Couldn't go back to sleep and it was a while later that the first reports on the TV started coming in.

I had been up for a while, and was reading usenet. I got the news on one of the sci.space.* groups around 8:30 (CST). I called to the wife to turn on the TV and saw the video loop of incandescent fragments over Texas. It was clear then that the astronauts had been killed.

I felt much less affected by this than by Challenger. Perhaps that's because I'm older, or more cynical, or because I realized belatedly after reacting emotionally to Challenger that astronaut deaths really aren't all that important, in the grand scheme of things. As has been pointed out here, one of the things that astronauts are going to be doing is dying, and if that's not acceptable to you then you really don't want a space program after all. One might say it's a symptom of the failure of the space program that there have been so *few* astronaut deaths (because so few have gone into space, because it's so expensive to do so.)

Rand,
You're right about the timing of course, I had my dates off. (OK, way off) Nonetheless the fact of the War on Terrorism was much on my mind at the time and when my friend said that "something terrible" had happened, it put me in mind of things orders of magnitude worse than losing a space shuttle.
Michael