I’ve been watching Columbia break apart for the last four hours… Now I’m looking at pieces of it found throughout Texas… a burning field…

Shades of Challenger, of course… I never thought about it, but I really didn’t expect to be seeing this all over again…

NASA does everything so damn good, that you just forget how amazingly dangerous space flight is. Ho hum, another shuttle went up and came down.

I think Peggy Noonan said that 9/11 made americans look up at the sky when a plane went by for the first time in years… This will mean the same thing for space flight, I’m sure.

We all worried about the future of NASA after Challenger. We trembled in fear when they finally sent up another shuttle; just sure that something was going to go wrong… But it didn’t… And 87 flights passed with no loss of life.

So now everyone is trying to guess about what caused the destruction of Columbia, but its going to be months before we have an answer. Shep Smith just said “There is no urgency now; the headline is written.”