[rintense]

Sounds silly, but maybe they'll make new shuttles like the ones in the movie 'Armageddon'.

[Ichneumon]

Sounds silly, but maybe they'll make new shuttles like the ones in the movie 'Armageddon'.

Those were (loosely) based on designs for the "second generation", bigger-and-better shuttles which were proposed at one point. But the "old" shuttles were doing fine and had a long projected lifetime (even Columbia, now cut short, put in over 20 years of service), so designing and building brand new shuttle models seemed an unnecessarily extravagent waste of money. That may be the case even now -- it would probably be a lot cheaper to just build new shuttles to the original plans than to redesign them from scratch.

[HighWheeler]

What a sad day.

My brother woke me up with a phone call at 9:21 and told me that the Columbia was 5 minutes late on landing and that there was no communication. The shuttle runs on a schedule down to no more than 1 or 2 seconds of variation at any moment of the planned mission. I knew immediately that she was lost.