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Outside Mission Control, in the hot path the flaming Columbia cut through the sky, no one needed to see computer data to know the day had taken a bad turn. In Nacogdoches, Texas, 17-year-old Heath Drewery was in bed when he was jolted by what sounded like an explosion outside his house. "I heard this big rumble and thought a train had derailed," he says. He and his brother piled into their truck and drove into town, where the street was littered with debris. "There were pieces all over the place. It looked like it was charcoal." In San Augustine, things got more grisly still, when body parts fell from the sky.
With reports coming back of a debris field that stretched from eastern Texas to Louisiana, NASA put out the somewhat disingenuous word that fumes from the fragments could be dangerous and that people who found them should leave them where they lay and alert the authorities--as if any toxic fuel could have survived the heat of re-entry. The more probable reason for the space agency's alerts was that tampering with the remains would make a proper investigation of the disaster that much harder. Worse, within hours pieces of debris purported to be from the lost space plane were already being hawked on eBay. Nobody wanted to see more of that.
At Camp David. President Bush was in his cabin when chief of staff Andrew Card learned of the accident while channel-surfing. He phoned the President, who decided to return to the White House by motorcade. A grim Bush scheduled a conference call with the families for 12:45 and at 12:30 was standing at his desk in the Oval Office scanning biographies of the crew members to see which ones had spouses and children.
"Tough day, tough day," he muttered. After placing the call, he left the office briefly to compose himself.
"He was emotional," said a speechwriter who was there. "He was misty eyed."
As NASA starts trying to pinpoint the cause of all this horror, investigators will have a lot of places to turn. The mission began with at least one anomaly when, at the moment of launch, a piece of foam broke from the insulation on the giant external fuel tank and struck the left wing of the ship. "We spent a goodly amount of time reviewing the film [of the launch] and analyzing what that might do," says shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore. "From our experience it was determined that the event did not represent a safety concern."
But that was before the hinky data started coming down from that same left side of the ship in the final seconds of the flight. Now the film that already got a once-over is going to be looked at a lot more closely. "We can't discount that those [events] may be connected," Dittemore admits, then hastens to add, "but a lot of things look like they're going to be the smoking gun in this business and turn out not to be."