Disturbing ...

[unixronin]

We built five Shuttles.  We've so far lost two of them: Challenger on January 28, 1986, during launch, and Columbia seventeen years later to the day, on February 1, 2003, during re-entry.

I just started reading Titan, by Stephen Baxter (not the one by John Varley).  It was first published in hardcover in November 1997.  The third event of consequence that happens in the book (the first is the arrival of the Huygens probe on Titan) is the loss of Columbia, during re-entry, apparently sometime in 2004.

Coincidence, of course.  But still somehow chilling, and I found myself unable to stop reading at that point.

Would Baxter still have written this if he'd had foreknowledge?  It's probably impossible to say.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And yes, I've always considered it a particularly ludicrous decision not just to use solids in the first place, but then to re-use the solids and throw away the external tank (along with whatever fuel and oxygen remained in it). At the point it's jettisoned, it'd be just as easy to carry it into orbit anyway.