The Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry this morning over central Texas, 15 minutes or so before it was to land in Florida.

UPDATE, 7:31 AM: The shuttle was traveling six times the speed of sound at 200,000 feet when it broke up. Officials say it is “highly unlikely” this was terrorism. Given the altitude and speed, it seems to me that if it was terrorism, it would have had to have been a device planted on board before launch. No missile or airplane could have brought this thing down, unless Al Qaeda is much more advanced than we think.

I was originally planning to go out this morning and try to watch the shuttle’s re-entry from here in Los Angeles. It was to pass roughly 300 miles north of here, so it would have been a faint view in the northern sky. I was dissuaded from doing so by the webmaster of SpaceWeather.com, Dr. Tony Phillips, who told me in an e-mail that the shuttle would probably appear very faint from that distance, and would be difficult or impossible to see through the city’s light dome, especially since due north of USC is the skyline of downtown L.A.

So, instead of perhaps seeing some of the final peaceful moments of the Space Shuttle Columbia, I was alerted to this tragedy by a phone call from Becky at around 6:53 AM Pacific time — a scenario eerily similar to a certain Tuesday morning in September 2001, when Becky woke me at 6:50 AM with a breaking-news phone call.

UPDATE, 7:43 AM: CNN reports that the most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles is existence can only reach 60,000 feet. They confirmed my hypothesis that the only possible terrorist connection would be something placed on board the shuttle.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds on InstaPundit.com is blogging about this, including the following observations:

Why it’s probably not terrorism: (1) if you planted a bomb, you’d want it to go off on takeoff — that’s when everyone is watching, and there’s less time for stuff to go wrong, since you’d have to wonder whether a bomb would work after spending an extended time in space; (2) it’s basically impossible to shoot down a reentering space shuttle because of its speed and altitude; (3) there are so many things that can go wrong with shuttles, especially Columbia, which is the oldest, without invoking terrorism. I suppose it’s conceivable that a saboteur did some sort of subtle structural damage calculated to cause this sort of a failure while remaining unnoticed during ground checks, but that strikes me as unlikely for a variety of reasons.

From the video it looks like structural failure, followed by an explosion as the spacecraft disintegrated. That’s unlikely to be the result of sabotage. Most likely it was failure in a wing spar or some other component, probably brought on by age and fatigue, though possibly caused by tile zippering and burn-through, or damage on launch. We’ll see. No point getting ahead of things here, but plenty of reason to think it’s not terrorism.

Reynolds also predicts that “this won’t traumatize people the way Challenger did” in part because “we’re at war now, and people’s calculations of such things — especially post-WTC — are different.”

So far, all SpaceWeather.com has is:

NASA has lost contact with the space shuttle Columbia. Check CNN and NASA for more information.

Dr. Phillips, the webmaster, was planning to try and watch re-entry from the San Francisco Bay Area this morning, so presumably he will post more later, perhaps with his thoughts from watching some of the shuttle’s final moments, if he was able to do so. (He would not have seen the explosion, but would have been watching it just a few minutes before.)

It will be interesting to see if Dr. Phillips or anyone else has videos or pictures of the shuttle over the Bay Area. It was supposed to be an excellent view from there, passing almost right overhead.

UPDATE, 8:00 AM: CBS is reporting that Barbara Morgan, schoolteacher Krista McAuliffe’s backup for the Challenger mission in 1986, is at Cape Canaveral today, and was scheduled to fly on Columbia in November.

CBS just got a prank call from some jackass in Texas claiming to have seen “Baba Booey’s teeth” in his backyard. He then called Dan Rather an “idiot.” Rather, slightly rattled, stated self-deprecatingly, “Well, it’s true that I’m an idiot, but that’s beside the point,” then apologized to the viewers for the prank call and moved on. (UPDATE, 2/6/03: Here’s a news article that mentions the prank call. Here’s a detailed play-by-play of what happened from an anti-Dan Rather website. And here’s a blog post about it. And apparently, MSNBC also got a prank call at around the same time. Here’s something about that.)

The flag at the Cape Canaveral landing site has just been lowered to half-staff, moving a CBS reporter to tears.

UPDATE, 8:05 AM: CBS points out that the astronauts on the International Space Station are due to return to Earth in March on Space Shuttle Atlantis, but if the shuttle is unable to launch because the investigation of this disaster is still underway and NASA doesn’t want to launch again yet, they can return via an emergency Soyuz re-entry vehicle if necessary.

CBS also notes that NASA, having lost another $3 billion shuttle, is now down to three shuttles.

UPDATE, 8:09 AM: Here is a map showing Columbia’s scheduled re-entry track.

There are various reports of shuttle debris being found on the ground in Texas. No word of injuries or damage yet. NASA is telling people not to touch any debris, because it could be toxic. (I’d think it might be a little hot, too.)

And now Israel suffers yet more national pain, as its first-ever astronaut, Air Force Colonel Ilan Ramon has died. (Interestingly enough, he participated in the 1981 mission to destroy Iraq’s nuclear weapons site.)

UPDATE, 8:15 AM: Dan Rather just nearly broke down into tears on the air.

UPDATE, 8:53 AM: I’m having trouble posting a copy of graphic here, but you can see the debris trail on radar. The best view is the Composite Reflectivity, Short Range Loop.

NBC is reporting that a heat-sensing satellite (which searches for missile launches, nuclear tests, etc.) spotted a burst of heat at Columbia’s location at the time of the breakup, suggesting that some sort of large explosion indeed occurred.

Meanwhile, in Nacogdoches, Texas, home of Stephen F. Austin University, all sorts of debris is being found. And in Plano, Texas, a piece of debris reportedly crashed into an apartment and caused a fire.

Nacogdoches is a city of 30,000, so it’s no surprise the earliest reports of damage are coming from there. Given that this is east Texas, I suspect the vast majority of debris will be found in isolated forests and fields. Thank goodness this happened over a mostly rural area instead of over, say, the Bay Area, which it flew over a few minutes earlier. Toxic, fiery debris falling from the sky over a large city could have been a major ground disaster as well as a spaceflight disaster.

UPDATE, 9:20 AM: I’m still working on the radar image, but here’s a photo of the shuttle breaking up:

More photos: 1 | 2 | 3

Meanwhile, Dr. Phillips, webmaster of SpaceWeather.com, has posted this Editor’s Note:

At the dawn of the space age some 40 years ago, we always knew who was orbiting Earth or flying to the Moon. Neil Armstrong, Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn. They were household names–everywhere.

Nowadays it�s different. Space flight has become more �routine.� Another flight of the shuttle. Another visit to the space station. Who�s onboard this time? Unless you�re a NASA employee or a serious space enthusiast, you might not know.

Dave Brown. Rick Husband. Bill McCool. Mike Anderson. Kalpana Chawla. Laural Clark. Ilan Ramon.

Now we know. These seven astronauts were tragically lost on Saturday, Feb. 1st, when the space shuttle Columbia (STS-107) broke apart over Texas.

Perhaps they were strangers to you before today. But if that’s so, why do you have a knot in your gut? What are those tears all about? Why do you feel so deep-down sad for seven strangers?

Astronauts have an unaccountable hold on us. They are explorers. Curious, humorous, serious, daring. Where they go, they go in peace. Every kid wants to be one. Astronauts are the essence of humanity�the good parts. They are somewhere inside each and every one of us.

They are not strangers. They are us.

Dave Brown asked yesterday, jokingly, �do we really have to come back?� No. But we wish you had.

The Science@NASA team extends its heartfelt sympathies to the family, friends and colleagues of the STS-107 crew.

UPDATE, 9:38 AM: Here’s an animated GIF of the radar:

The borders, cities, etc., do not appear because the radar is shrunk to half-size, but if you click on it, you can see everything in the full-size version.

UPDATE, 9:45 AM: The flag at half-staff at the Kennedy Space Center:

UPDATE, 10:17 AM: If I were NASA, I wouldn’t do any more missions in late January or early February. There have been three deadly accidents in the whole history of NASA, and all have happened within a calendar week: the Apollo 1 tragedy on Jan. 27, 1967; the Challenger tragedy on Jan. 28, 1986; and now, the Columbia tragedy on Feb. 1, 2003.

Jim Flowers’ Radio Weblog has set up a special section called Shuttle Lost documenting “how the blog community reacts” to this tragedy.

People are reacting on Fark.com, too. There are already more than 700 comments, and counting.

UPDATE, 10:24 AM: These poor folks lost a son on Sept. 11 and a niece on the Space Shuttle Columbia.

NASA is now giving a press conference. No big revelations yet.

UPDATE, 10:29 AM: “The loss of this valiant crew is something we will never be able to get over. … A more courageous group of people, you could not have hoped to know.” –NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, barely holding back tears.

UPDATE, 10:36 AM: San Francisco TV station KPIX has an article about Bay Area residents watching the shuttle several minutes before it was lost. I’m still looking for pictures.

Now they’re saying it was moving at Mach 18.

UPDATE, 11:03 AM: President Bush is about to address the nation. CNN was just recalling Reagan’s famous “slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God” speech after the Challenger explosion.

UPDATE, 11:14 AM: “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls who we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home.” –George W. Bush.

Not a great speech, but he did the job. You can’t envy him; I’ve always though mourner-in-chief is one of the president’s toughest roles.

UPDATE, 11:48 AM: In an article that attempts to put this tragedy into the context of the present national mood, the New York Times points out something that I, too, had noticed, but had been afraid to post here, lest I risk sounding glib:

In a twist of nomenclature that would seem implausible in fiction, a craft carrying Col. Ilan Ramon of the Israeli Air Force apparently broke up over an East Texas town called Palestine.

UPDATE, 12:55 PM: Here is an MP3 file of my wake-up call this morning — Becky calling me from Arizona with news about the space shuttle tragedy. I believe the call came at 6:53 AM. Just like on Sept. 11, the phone didn’t ring (or, I didn’t hear it), so she left a message, and the message woke me up.

(Update: It turns out I’m not the only blogger who got the news by phone today after an abortive attempt to go look at the shuttle. Nor am I the only one who was struck by the eerie similarity to 9/11.)

More recently, a comment from Becky via e-mail: “did you see poor george w. bush? he was all like, uh, something fell from the sky over texas and almost hit my ranch godammit.”

She added, “poor astronauts.”

UPDATE, 1:25 PM: Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit has the following thoughts on the ongoing NASA press conference:

It looks like a zipper effect followed by burnthrough and structural damage, leading to the loss of the left wing. They’re reporting anomalous heat sensor readings, loss of tire pressure in the main gear on that side, and so on. The shuttle can tolerate the loss of a tile or two. But when the integrity of the tile cover is breached, tiles can be pulled off one after another — hence the term “zipper effect.” Then enough heat can penetrate through in sufficient quantity to destroy or weaken what’s underneath.

He also points out that many Iraqis are evidently celebrating the tragedy. Bastards.

UPDATE, 1:33 PM: Here’s the full text of Bush’s speech. And here’s Reagan’s speech from 1986.

The Poynter Institute has lots of useful resources. Here, too, are some more breaking news sources.

Here is somebody else’s archived animated GIF of the radar of the debris trail.

UPDATE, 1:45 PM: I need to take a break from posting now, and work on homework and such. I may post some further updates, but not as constant as it’s been this morning and early afternoon. In the meantime, for the latest photos related to the Columbia disaster, click here.

May the crew of Columbia rest in peace.