I was pretty young, still in elementary school, but I remember the day it happened pretty well... The night before, I had been watching the mission on NASA TV. However, I wasn't paying as much attention to the mission as I wish I would have. I knew the shuttle was to land on Feb. 1st, although I didn't know when and didn't make plans to watch it. The next morning, my sister ran in to wake me up... She had this weird surprised smile on her face, and shouted, "The space shuttle blew up!" "What?" "The space shuttle blew up!" "No, it can't blow up. It's landing today, but it couldn't blow up!" "Yes it did!" "No, it can't, go away." Then I went back to sleep... Later when I woke up and looked at the news, I realized that indeed it had disintegrated. It was extremely hard to believe. I spent lots of time looking on the internet to find out as much as I could about what had happened. A few days--or maybe even a week or two--later,the teachers at my school passed out small newspapers dedicated to it. I think they were printed by the Amarillo Globe News. They were full of lots of pictures and stories of the crew, the disaster, the recovery efforts, the debris, etc. I don't know what happened to my copy, I wish I would have kept up with it x.x The tragedy was pretty big in my area, considering that Rick Husband was from Amarillo. A lot of the younger 1st-2nd grade kids drew pictures and hung them up in the hallways. As for me, I built a few space shuttle paper models and thought about it for months.
The Amarillo airport was quickly renamed Rick Husband International Airport. In the baggage claim area, they hung up a large copy of his astronaut portrait. There's also a bronze statue of Rick Husband in his ACES suit. Here's some pictures I took of it about a week ago when I was flying back from Houston.
