Three years ago today, it was a bright saturday morning and I was headed to the examination for my amateur radio license. While driving there, I heard on the radio that NASA had lost communications with the space shuttle Columbia, which was heading over Texas for a landing. I found out shortly thereafter that the shuttle had broken up during reentry and had been lost. If I had only thought to look up that morning, I might have actually seen the pieces of the shuttle fly overhead.

I held on to a couple of digital memorabilia from the event. One is an audio capture from the NOAA Weather Radio, classified as a Civil Emergency Message and presumably broadcast across Texas and Louisiana:

Civil Emergency Message (mp3)

The other is this weather radar capture from Shreveport, LA with the shuttle debris clearly visible across the display:



My heart goes out to the families of those who gave their lives in the name of space science. It is not for me to judge whether accidents like this should have happened or not, but they did and we must move forward.