News: Space Shuttle Columbia Breaks Up

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I know I said I’ll be taking a blogging holiday, but waking up with the news that the Space Shuttle Columbia has broken up on re-entry with the loss of 7 lives still comes to as a shock. It was built in 1978 and was first flown in 1981 (I’ve heard it rumored that this was supposedly the Columbia’s last mission)

I’m watching the BBC News feed at the moment, but it appears that the shuttle lost contact with NASA Florida’s space centre around an hour before it was due to land, and then 15 minutes before it was due to land at 1416 GMT debris was spotted and it seems the shuttle has disintegrated. Earlier indications report that it has not exploded, but NASA has declared a state of emergency and President Bush is returning to the White House to make a statement. It possible that there was a heat-shield failure.

It is extremely unlikely that there are any survivors of mission STS 107 as the shuttle broke up travelling at over 12,500 mph (20,000 kph – around 18 times the speed of sound) over 200,000ft above Texas as it was gliding in to land. Your thoughts please for the families of Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, David Brown, Michael Anderson and the first Israel in space – Ilan Ramon. This was the 113th flight in the program’s 22 years and Columbia’s 28th flight – the last major incident which caused loss of life was the space shuttle Challenger exploding just after lift-off on Jan 28th 1986 (when another seven crew members lost their lives).

More coverage from ABC News, ITV News, MSNBC and many other news organisations – news reports are being gathering in this new ODP category. There are images taken from the mission available at the BBC News site – looking at those pictures helps you realise that there were, in fact, human beings in the shuttle and that they probably were burnt alive and suffered suffication during the last few minutes of their lives.

There is also a good timeline which illustrates what happened when.

Other blog entries: Quinn Macdonalds, Tampa Tantrum, Gamer’s Nook, Bill Egible, Boing Boing, Stupidevilbastard, Jason Defillippo, About D@mn Time, No Prerequisite, Carisenda, Mr. Mist’s Blog, Mouse Musings, From The Orient, Spinneyhead.

17:11: Flags are now flying at half mast at the NASA launch site as it is officially announced the shuttle is “gone”. Kennedy Space Center workers have been told that all work has been cancelled for this weekend. Only essential personnel should report for their duties. Operatives at the Space Center have already started to put folders, printouts and other information into boxes for later data analysis to hopefully find out what went wrong – I’m hearing that the shuttle came in for re-entry at too steep an angle which burnt through the heat shield (and the resulting radioactivity caused by this would have probably caused the last garbled communications from Columbia at 2pm GMT/UTC).

Picture (c) BBC News
Originally posted: 15:58. Updated: 16:16, 16:48, 17:11, 17:32
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