Temperature Spiked on Columbia's Reentry NASA engineers settled into their long, joyless task of figuring out how space shuttle Columbia broke apart, saying conditions in the shuttle's final minutes point to a possible problem with its critical heat-protection tiles.
Hundreds of investigators with expertise in airline accidents, engineering and forensics converged on Texas and Louisiana to join in the painstaking job of retrieving pieces of the space shuttle Columbia from a swath of forested country turned disaster area.
Columbia Tragedy Touches Local Classes The Columbia crew conducted more than 80 science experiments on their mission. That included two from a group of Montgomery County students.
Two sudden and very public national tragedies have hit especially close to home for one Iowa couple.
Doug and Betty Haviland lost their niece, Laurel Clark, yesterday when she perished aboard space shuttle "Columbia."
Just 17 months earlier, the Havilands lost their son when he died after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center.
Betty Haviland says grief and death is something everybody goes through – but she says it's not normal to watch it happen over and over again on television.
She adds that "you can't not watch because that's your son or your niece up there."
Clark was one of seven astronauts on board the space shuttle when it disintegrated over Texas yesterday. Their son Timothy had worked on the 96th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.
