The moment of truth for Wayne Hale:

Much later, while the debris recovery effort was going on in East Texas, the trajectory analysts put together an estimated plot of where the Columbia pieces would have come down for a 1 rev late deorbit. The toe of the ellipse – where the heaviest pieces would come down – cut across the southwestern suburbs of Houston. My home – my wife – would have been in the target zone where the 2 ton steel main engine combustion chambers would have hit the ground at supersonic speeds. JSC would have been at ground zero for the debris; the MCC would likely have been struck. That is a scenario that is just too implausible for words.

Knowing what we now know, it might have seemed, in some sense, ironic, poetic justice.

The German rocket scientist who was born too young to be part of von Braun’s team has died. Is anyone from von Braun’s team left?