My heart especially goes out to Ray Knispel, the OTC who launched the Columbia (his first launch, I believe.) He and the other members of the launch team will have to carry this with them forever, and wonder if there was anything that they did wrong.
My heart also goes out to the tile techs and mechanical techs at KSC who will be wondering the same.
There is a lot of crying going on down there right now.
I knew this Forward Tech who was a member of the select "closeout crew". He quit one day and I asked him why. He told me "If I stayed, I know that one day I would load the astronauts into the crew module, and they wouldn't come back. I couldn't live with that."
There's a lot of that going on right here right now.
Hard to type.
I think there may be a lot of crying going on all over the world tonight. They were more than Americans and a Israeli,they were Earthmen and women.