On February 1, 2003, NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard and marking one of the most tragic days in American spaceflight history.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Miles O’Brien is the science correspondent for PBS NewsHour and an aviation analyst for CNN. He was previously a staff correspondent and anchor with CNN, based in Atlanta and New York.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University. He is the author of “American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great ...

IT'S BEEN JUST a month since the space shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas, killing its seven-member crew. The commission investigating the disaster, which held its first public meeting Thursday, ...