Today reminds me of 9/11, of course, and of the day in 1986 when a fellow student burst into my high school American history class with the seemingly improbable news that the shuttle had exploded. I tried to explain how this really wasn't possible until -- with a growing number of people now saying the same thing -- it began to dawn on me that maybe I didn't grasp quite so much of the engineering, aeronautics and physics of the matter as I'd imagined.

I've always been a great enthusiast of manned space flight, something I get from my father. So, like everyone else, I find this simply devastating. I've spent most of the morning sitting dumb-faced and silent in front of my television. Watching the pre-flight interviews with the crew is heartbreaking.

Beside that, it's hard to know what else to say. The shuttle takes off in what is essentially a controlled explosion. It lands in a precipitous drop, racing at thousands of miles an hour, much of the time encased in a fireball. That is a terribly risky enterprise. Words fail. It's tragic -- an unimaginably violent, sudden catastrophe tucked away in the sky.