oh crap...

[blufive]

It looks like something very nasty happened to the space shuttle Columbia on its return from orbit.

BBC
Washington Post
Slashdot [Warning: crappy signal-to-noise ratio, including some tasteless "jokes", but I'm including it because the comments include some eye-witness stuff, and links to loads of other news sources]

Nasa lost contact at about 14:00 GMT, when Columbia was doing about 12,500mph at 200,000 feet near Dallas, Texas, on its way to a landing at Cape Canaveral. Eye witnesses report seeing a vapour trail, which split into several trails, and hearing a loud rumble or bang.

Obviously, the chances that any of the seven crew survived a high-speed vehicle disintegration 40 miles up are not good.

Given the presence of an Israeli astronaut on board, several people are speculating about terrorism. I think that's highly unlikely - there are no Surface-to-Air Missiles that I know of that could engage something that high and fast.

Comments

[zotz]

An external attack's a non-starter, I'd say. Sabotage conceivably, but why so late in the mission? Most likely just (just?) a system or mechanical failure.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

Yup. Mach [lots], 40 miles up, no way it was a missile.

Sabotage strikes me as unlikely, too - from what I know, they check just about everything - the chances of anyone getting anything on board that shouldn't be there are as close to nil as makes no odds.

Apparently there was some kind of incident on take-off, where something came off the external tank and hit the port wing, but they reckoned everything was OK.

I agree, most likely it was some kind of technical failure - at that speed, if anything structural gives way (even something tiny), aerodynamics will finish it off in no time. :(