Lest we Forget: Six years ago today - 02/01/03

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First heard about it on the radio, then saw it on TV. Sad day for the world. They were only 16 minutes from landing

I also can remember Challenger, first Bob Barker and the Price is Right being interrupted for a CBS news special report, and then my kindergarten teacher sobbing uncontrollably at the start of class in the afternoon.

Good post Scoots5012, I had forgotten. I bought the Grand Am that I had before my pickup that day. RIP Columbia crew.

I have not forgotten either....I still remember Challenger and the 1967 Apollo fire that killed Grissom, Chaffee, and White.

I will never forget, being in east Texas helping my fiancee at the time (now my wife) move some furniture into the new apartment we were going to be renting. We could see it in the sky, and then before long there were pieces of debris scattered for hundreds of miles around us. When we heard about it on the radio, it confirmed our fears about what we had seen. The debris cleanup mission was headquartered at Barksdale Air Force Base, about 1 mile from my house, where they would take all the debris before eventually shipping it all on covered flatbed trucks to NASA.

Back during the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster I was in Kindergarten, and they called the entire school into the library to watch the launch. That was not a good day either. Coincidentally the school I attended when I watched that in 1986 was literally just down the road from the Air Force base where the Columbia debris was initially taken.

I found out about Challenger blowing up when I stopped at the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters on my lunch break back when I was working as a janitor at the Public Saftey building (Police HQ) in Portland Maine. I was in disbelief that it happened as apparently most other people were. --It was also a very cold, sunny day.

When Columbia broke up, I was installing the concrete fascia and counter surfaces that I had helped to fabricate for the checkout desk at the Duke University Medical Center Library. I was in less disbelief this time, though I was in disbelief and mystified when people were trying to sell burnt fragments of Columbia on eBay. --Why would anybody want to buy something like this?

I'm totally going to hell for what I thought when I saw the top picture.

You may consider the rest of this post some respectful (and apologetic) silence.

All hail the crew of the Columbia. May they be remembered forever, along with all the others who died to put mankind into space, and to bring him back again.

In an odd coincidence, 50 years ago today (Feb. 3, 1959), Jiles Perry Richardson, Jr. (a.k.a., "The Big Bopper"), Charles Hardin Holley (a.k.a., "Buddy Holly"), Richard Steven Valenzuela (a.k.a., "Ritchie Valens"), and their pilot Roger Peterson were killed in a small-plane crash in Iowa - an event that has become known as "The Day the Music Died," thanks to Don McLean's "American Pie."

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