[fuente]

Well going sideways is a little strong. The S turns used for braking and rotating the leading edges for heat dissapation purposes, involves a small bank to the right and a small bank to the left. When an aircraft turns, it really kinda slides sideways, meaning the trajectory vector is more toward the path of original momentum, than the orientation of the vessle. It was also at the beginning of this bank turn to the right (leading edges to the left) when the disaster struck.

[Alberta's Child]

If you go through the sequence of events and read some of the eyewitness accounts from other Freepers in the western U.S., it would seem that the catastrophic failure occurred long before the thing even got to Texas. Some people reported seeing "unusual" characteristics in the re-entry as far away as California.