After the WTC, this does not shock me. I have never liked the shuttle. It just didn't inspire like Gemini and Apollo. There are a lot of strange coincidences on this tragedy. An Israeli and an Indian on board. AOL news says that the Indian lady made a series of mistakes on a previous shuttle flight with a satelite launch. It meant that a subsequent shuttle mission had to go back up and fix it during EVA. Columbia broke up over Texas. Did they say where on the map they lost contact with Columbia? Did they have verbal contact?
Latest information coming out is that during the initial re-entry phase, NASA started picking up sensor readings that were giving bizarre data on the left wing.
Normally this isn't that unusual, but these sensors were scattered, and independent of each other.
As NASA called back to Columbia to find out what was happening, you got a "Roger" from the crew, and then static.
Couple that, with the insulation coming off during the launch, and hitting the left wing, and things are starting to add up. Maybe...