There you have the proof: Superman went faster than the speed of light and where (when?) did he arrive? At least half an hour earlier!

This is something that most people who know at least a little about space travel already suspected, but NASA actually decided to go ahead and state that, even if they were absolutely sure that the Columbia had been seriously damaged at lift-off, and could not make the re-entry safely, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help the astronauts. It would take them at least four months to be able to send another space shuttle to the rescue, the astronauts could not repair that sort of structural damage themselves, and taking refuge in the International Space Station was impossible, because the orbits were too far apart.

So, in short, even if NASA was aware of a serious problem right from the start (and it seems that at least some people had major concerns), the austronauts were doomed to either a slow, agonizing death in space or to burst into flames at re-entry. Makes you wonder were all the money goes...

PS - Mr. Creosote: I did watch Superman, and I had just about managed to forget it until you went and mentioned it.

Very likely.

I've been hardly following anything about the space shuttle, but I already know the Isreali's name by heart, and have no idea about the other 6. He gets more media attention than the other 6 combined squared.

On the Indian and black, I believe they were selected because they were the most qualified. Maybe 10 years ago it would have been just for divirsity, but I truly believe they were there honestly.

Delos: What is a 'honourable way to die'?

Dizzy: Haven't you seen the first Superman movie?

On the Isreali: I think it's even more typical that there were all 'different groups' represented on board (apart from the Isreali): black/white/Indian, man/woman and so on and so on (what about heterosexual/homosexual? ). Why does everything has to be so bloody 'politically correct'?

Yesterday, in a radio show: "I am glad that the space shuttle crashed. This way, there is one less Israeli to kill the Palestinian people."

Quite frankly, I'm not too happy about people concentrating on the Israeli astronaut, either...

Well I sucribe to the Consipiciary theory that they never went to the moon anyway so they should start their next step by actually going

Every time they start to develop a space craft that takes off like a plane the end the funding to it.

Dizzy: Lets hope the new space crafts take off like a plane and stop wasting so much freaking fuel!!! The whole idea of the wing is to use the air underneath it to keep it up, but the space crafts fly straight up, and hence no air under the wings!

Actually, according to Einstein's theory of relativity they would have disappeared into the future.

Serioulsy though, I understand that seeing a shuttle go up in flames carries an emotional punch that many other events don't have. But I think that's mostly because shuttle accidents are (thankfully) a rare occourance. Thousands of people die on airplane crashes every year, yet they hardly make the headlines anymore. Some day space-flight will be as safe and current as flying on a plane, but accidents will always happen.

I hope that, at least, something good will come out of this, and NASA finally decides to scrape their 30-year old, obsolete, money-hungry shuttles, for a new type of space vehicle, that can give a new boost to their space program.

No, of course he doesn't! (see attachment)

18 times the speed of sound maybe!

It's funny really how they cocked this all up, out of all the people that died it's the Jewish guy who gets all the news, noticed that??

They didn't talk about the Indian woman at first, did they?? No, they had to go to Israel and the wailing wall... pfft... I mean, he was a combat fighter pilot, that was an honorable way to die!

And also, they never mentioned that they would have died instantly, did they?? If the vacuum didn't kill them they would have been roasted in the first couple of milliseconds, pritty damn painless!

And another point, does Bush look more dopey as he gets further into his term?? I mean, look at him!! He looks like a monkey!

I agree, this thing is at least 10 times too big for the little accident which happened up there. Did anyone ever said space exploration was safe?

(the following post includes pure cynism - if this offends you, don't read it)
That explains where the whole shuttle disappeared to - into the past!

For better comparison: at the same day, 7 highschool children got killed in an avalanche in Canada; second such accident in less than a month. Yet, nobody reported on that, either.

In addition, I learned that any other terrible events happening at the same time won't get any attention: Did you know that about 40-50 people were killed by an explosion in Nigeria the same day?

At the risk of being cynycal, this is what I learned from this tragedy (and many others):

* It takes 10-15 minutes to come up with a name for the tragedy, and another 30 minutes to create flashy animations.

* It takes less than an hour to come up with the first viable theory.

* It takes 2-4 hours to wake up your star reporters, so that you get some decent reporting.

* It takes 8-12 hours to come up with some whistleblowers who knew this would happen, but were ignored and/or fired.

* It takes less than 24 hours for the first items from the crash to appear on eBay.

* It will take 5 to 7 years to conclude the investigation.

yeha the idiots who said terrorist attacks, there is only one type of missle that can reach the altitude the shuttle was at about 200,000 feet the OSDM or something along those lines but even that can do the 12,000 odd mph the shuttle was doing. Even so do you think the terrorists would have these types of missles.

On a more serious note, the students of Glen Waveryl college here in Victoria Australia who lost their spider project studying the effect of weightlessness on a spiders web making cxapacity.
They showed the teachers in charge of this project on the news here and they were more concerned about their spiders than the 7 peoiple that died.

The first speculations I saw were of course: "That was a terrorist attack." Sure, several tousand kilometers above the earth. Hope they've abandoned this thought by now...