A Shuttle Exploding Over My Head

I live in Dallas (with my wife, Hope, and our cat, Lucy), about 2 miles east of downtown. Earlier this morning, while enjoying a late Saturday morning in bed, I woke up to the sound of a very loud sonic boom over head, which lasted about 10 or 12 seconds. It rattled the windows of our old house. Since I've been working lately on an essay about the likelihood of the US using tactical nukes in Iraq, my very first reaction was "I wonder if that's some kind of ballistic missile?" When nothing seemed to explode or burst into flames, I rolled over and went back to sleep for 30 minutes.

As probably everyone knows by now, the sound I heard was the sound of a US space shuttle breaking up over my head -- the debris trail goes from Palestine (where my lifelong friend Collin Williams has family) all the way out to Nacogdoches (where I spent my first semester in college, at 18) to the Louisiana border and beyond.

Damn... this really sucks. I find myself hoping that this disaster was the result of mechanical failure, not malign human actions. If it's the latter, rather than the former, I suspect that the Israeli astronaut aboard having participated in Israel's strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 won't turn out to be a coincidence.

The TV is warning us not to touch any suspected debris because of very likely health hazards (rocket fuel is very nasty) -- I think we would have figured that out on our own, but you never know.