I protest.

Falling stars.

There's a really excellent article at The Atlantic Online by William Langewiesche, "Columbia's Last Flight." Langewiesche follows the flight from beginning to end. He shows us not only what caused the tragedy, but how the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and in particular Hal Gehman uncovered the facts against NASA resistance. He is very fair and evenhanded and certainly singles no one out as deserving of blame. In a sense, those who took part were almost as much victims of the NASA bureacracy as the crew.

The Columbia accident struck close to home for me in a nearly literal sense, as I spent altogether too much of my life in East Texas and in Nacogdoches in particular. When I turned on the television that day in February and saw the radar return of the debris, I noticed that the southeastern edge was very close indeed to where my Mom lives, in a house out in the woods east and south of Nacogdoches. Two or three years ago, I was there for Christmas when the shuttle was landing in Florida. Having lived in Los Angeles when the shuttle still landed at Edwards, I recognized the double bang of the dual sonic booms. When I called my Mom that day, she said that she didn't hear any sonic booms, but had heard what was almost a roaring noise and the trees around her house had been shaking violently. Instead of a big dual boom, I guess that there were thousands of much smaller booms.

Weeks later, she told me that the searchers had crossed her property. I know all of the places in Nacogdoches where debris fell, and in fact a piece or two landed on a cousin's house a bit north of the town. The forests and swamps of East Texas are such that I'm sure that bits of debris will continue to be found for decades, if not longer.

East Texas is not a good place to live. I'm sorry that it had to be the place where seven astronauts died. Langewiesche concludes his article by describing the progress of the Columbia breakup, as the left wing broke off, then

… the tail, the right wing, and the main body came apart in what investigators later called a controlled sequence "right down the track." As had happened with the Challenger in 1986, the crew cabin broke off intact. It assumed a stable flying position, apparently nose high, and later disintegrated like a falling star across the East Texas sky.