![]() ![]() Reports began coming in that Columbia had “exploded” over Dallas. In Sabine County, Texas, Greg and Sandra Cohrs sat down to breakfast and turned on their television. He immediately phoned Galbraith and told him they needed to meet at the FBI office in Tyler. Millslagle turned on his TV and saw video of Columbia disintegrating. There are reports that Lake Palestine is on fire.” The sheriff’s office called again a few minutes later. They checked and phoned back, “It was the space shuttle reentering.” That didn’t seem plausible, since the shuttle’s sonic booms wouldn’t be audible at sea level until the shuttle was well east of them. Millslagle phoned the Smith County sheriff’s office to see if they had any reports of unusual activity. No other natural phenomenon could have caused such a prolonged banging. His colleague Peter Galbraith phoned him and asked, “What the hell was that?” They speculated that perhaps one of the pipelines running through the area had exploded. Millslagle was one of the FBI’s senior supervisory resident agents in Tyler. But as the noise continued, he realized it was unlike anything he had ever heard. As a California native, he at first thought it was an earthquake. In Tyler, Texas, Jeff Millslagle laced up his shoes for a training run for the upcoming Austin marathon. This condensed excerpt focuses on the first few hours after the accident, which occurred shortly after 8 a.m., Texas time, as officials struggled to realize what had happened, and before an army of citizen volunteers joined in the search, which would go on for weeks. In their riveting new book, Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew, former NASA launch director Michael Leinbach and Jonathan Ward chronicle the loss of space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003, and the subsequent search operation, the largest in U.S.
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