You see the Columbia was very special to me. It actually flew by my office one day. I couldn't believe I got to see it the way I did. I couldn't believe it could fly the way it did. It was going to the air force base that is located very near where I was. What I saw totally amazed me and left me speechless for a while. It made me very proud to be an American that day.
I was dating a guy that was an air force mechanic and was scheduled to work on the plane that was carrying the shuttle. He wanted to get pictures of it. He borrowed my camera. He took these pictures with the understanding that I would get copies of them and I could reproduce them if I wanted to, since he wouldn't have gotten them without the use of my camera. I consider these his pictures and thus are copyrighted to him, but I've always had the use of them and feel like its okay to share them.
The other reason I've always had a special connection to Columbia is because I heard it when it exploded on Feb 1, 2003. ( heres more on the Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster from Wikipedia) . I'll never forget hearing the sonic boom and wondering what on year could that be. It didn't take long for it to be on all the news stations.
It broke apart very close to where I was living at the time, Northwest Louisiana . I actually knew people that had some of the debris fly into their yard. It took months to recover what they did, and during that whole time it was a very sobering experience. The whole area mourned the loss.
I feel it is only fitting that we keep the memory alive for other people to realize what a true tragic loss it was when we did loose the Columbia. It was after this loss that they shut the space shuttle program down.
Space Shuttle Columbia, Spring 1982 |
8-2-2011
I read on the internet they discovered a piece of the Columbia in an east Texas lake.
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