I heard the boom this morning, but I didn’t realize that the shuttle was coming in so I didn’t have any idea what might have caused it.  I thought that it might just have been a sonic boom from a military aircraft of some sort.  I haven’t heard them in many years, but with the military on higher alert status recently, I didn’t think it that much out of the ordinary.  I remember when I was growing up we used to get them from the aircraft going to Barksdale AFB (this was in the late 70’s and early 80’s and someone once told me that they were SR-71s, but I don’t know whether that was true or not).  It wasn’t until I met up with some friends to go to the boat show that they told me what had happened (I spent most of the morning in a news blackout because those goons at Charter can’t seem to keep the cable TV and internet working on Saturday mornings; this is the third time in six weeks that this has happened).

It’s a terrible thing and I hope that we find out what happened.  From what I’ve read in the past couple of minutes it is going to be a very difficult task due to the violence of the breakup (the shuttle was traveling at over 12,000 mph at over 200,000 ft altitude).

Off to check the news networks for updates…