Oh Jesus God.

Space Shuttle Columbia Feared Crashed in Texas

The space shuttle Columbia was feared crashed in Texas on Saturday with seven astronauts on board after it lost contact with NASA (news - web sites) minutes before landing.

Television images showed several white trails in the blue sky, which could be an indication of the breakup of the shuttle because normally only a single trail is visible. Officials immediately warned about the possibility of toxic debris in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The U.S. space agency said it scrambled rescue units to search in Texas for the shuttle and its astronauts, which included the first Israeli to fly on the shuttle, Col. Ilan Ramon. There was no immediate indication of any foul play, officials said.

A NASA spokesman said the agency lost contact with the shuttle, which was completing a 16-day mission, at around 9 a.m. while it was 207,000 feet above the Earth, and 16 minutes out from its scheduled landing at Kennedy Space Center

There are no words

I don't know what to say. I mean, just a few days ago we were remembering the anniversary of Challenger and the Apollo 1 fire, and...

The Universe has a particularly sick sense of humor. I didn't know - I was playing SimCity 4 on the PC. I'd just shut down the game because I was feeling tired, I wandered back into my room to check e-mail and see what was on LJ and then I saw an e-mail with the subject of the Columbia tragedy and I thought at first someone had mistyped Challenger and then I looked at Chimera and saw my Yahoo! news page with the headline... and then I glanced at the window to #filkhaven and people were talking. And I'm flashing back to 1986, that morning when a classmate told me about Challenger and I was shellshocked for the rest of the day.

And I'm watching the footage on BBC World now, switching between that and CNN, the debris breaking up again and again and that same sense of unreality that I felt when I saw the smoking towers on September 11, and I'm hoping and praying they got out in time and I know that they couldn't have, not at 200,000 feet, and Jesus God it looks like a shower of stars.

And I'm dreading the days to come, dreading the inquiries and the blame and dreading the news that NASA will kill the shuttle program or scale it back and that Congress is going to use this as an excuse to say Mars is going to be another twenty years further away. And it's another special mission, with Ramon this time instead of McAuliffe, and I can't imagine what it feels like for a Jew to have the first Israeli into space become a casualty. High time the shuttle program was revamped and the vehicle redesigned anyway - it's 1970s tech, after all. There will be words and press conferences and statements and speculation and it's all going to mater jack shit to seven people. Unless. Except. Unless we let this stop us from going back to the stars.

In the end, and not the end, I don't know what to say about this except that this can't be how it ends and it shouldn't be how it ends. It's all jumbled up, and I really, really want to wake up now, please.

Remains found among shuttle debris

Remains found among shuttle debris

Human remains have been found among the debris left by the US space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated just minutes before its scheduled landing.

All seven astronauts on board were killed when the craft broke up after re-entering the Earth's atmosphere on Saturday.

Three separate inquiries are opening into the disaster - the American space agency Nasa will conduct its own investigation, as will the US Congress, and the government is forming an independent commission to try to discover what went wrong.