SHUTTLE NEWS….FoxNews has a nice set of bios of the Columbia crew.
Seth Johnson has good ongoing coverage of the tragedy. But watch the timestamps if you want to read them in order. Basically, morning coverage is here and afternoon coverage is in a separate post that’s currently at the top of the page.
Space.com has a lot of good coverage, including photos.
The official NASA site for the Columbia flight is here.
The Christian Science Monitor has an article on the international implications of the disaster: “When the Challenger was destroyed in 1986, the US operated its space program on its own. But over the past decade, nations that had been interested in running their own space programs – Canada, Japan, and several European nations – had decided to abandon their own efforts and join with the US’s manned space flight efforts. The question that will be faced in the coming weeks is how this tragedy will effect the global manned space program.”
Time has some speculation on what caused the disaster. Most likely is “an aerodynamic structural breakup of the shuttle caused by it rolling at the wrong angle.” An Italian astronaut, Umberto Guidoni, who has been on two previous shuttle missions, apparently agrees: “The angle of penetration should be at 40 degrees to the horizon….The margin of error is at most three or four degrees. Beyond that range the shuttle becomes uncontrollable.”
