High over Texas and just short of home, space shuttle Columbia fell to pieces, raining debris over hundreds of miles of countryside. Seven astronauts perished.
Saturday's catastrophe occurred 63km above the Earth, in the last 16 minutes of the 16-day mission as the spaceship re-entered the atmosphere and glided in for a landing in Florida. The day echoed one almost exactly 17 years before, when the Challenger space shuttle exploded.
"The Columbia is lost," said US President George W. Bush, after telephoning the families of the astronauts to console them.
"The same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today," Bush said. "The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth but we can pray they are safely home."
The search for the cause began immediately. One focus: possible damage to Columbia's protective thermal tiles on the left wing from a flying piece of debris during liftoff on Jan. 16.
The loss of seven explorers of space's dark reaches -- shuttle commander Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, William McCool and Ilan Ramon -- brought grief to the nation.
Investigations
NASA appointed an independent commission to investigate. The agency said the first indication of trouble Saturday was the loss of temperature sensors in the left wing's hydraulic system.
The spacecraft had just re-entered the atmosphere and had reached the point at which it was subjected to the highest temperatures.
NASA officials said they suspected the wing was damaged on liftoff, but felt there was no reason for concern.
A piece of insulating foam on its external fuel tank came off shortly after liftoff and was believed to have hit the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded any damage was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.
"As we look at that now in hindsight ... we can't discount that there might be a connection," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said Saturday. "But we have to caution you and ourselves that we can't rush to judgment on it because there are a lot of things in this business that look like the smoking gun but turn out not even to be close."
Authorities said there was no indication of terrorism; at 62,140m and traveling at 20,112kph, 18 times the speed of sound, the shuttle was out of range of any surface-to-air missile. Security was extraordinarily tight on this mission because Ramon, Israel's first astronaut, was among the crew members.
Inexperienced crew
It was a relatively inexperienced crew; only three -- Husband, Anderson and Indian-born Chawla -- had flown before.
The others were rookies, including Ramon, the 48-year-old Israeli Air Force colonel. A former fighter pilot who survived two wars, he carried into space a small pencil drawing titled Moon Landscape by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy killed at Auschwitz.
"The state of Israel and its citizens are as one at this difficult time," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office said in a statement.
Television footage showed a bright light followed by white smoke plumes streaking diagonally across the sky. Debris appeared to break off into separate balls of light as it continued downward.
"We saw it coming across the sky real bright and shiny and all in one piece. We thought it was the sun shining off an airplane," said Doug Ruby, who was driving along a Texas highway. "Then it broke up in about six pieces -- they were all balls of fire -- before it went over the tree line."
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