Jacob, having known some damned fine high-flight-time pilots and having been seriously burned twice I can attest to a number of things.

One, when it happens during high stress moments it doesn’t hurt immediately, your mind goes into survival/trained-for-this-moment mode. You’re simply to goddamned busy doing your best to resolve the problem to think about it.

Two, I honestly believe there was no way for either pilot to keep his hand off the stick when it became obvious things were going south in one hell of a hurry. They were pilots, it had been so trained into them to react to such situations that it would have been almost instinctive.

As for the ghoulishness of the whole affair, we have to look at it, or the mistakes will be repeated, over and over again. I, for one, want to know what went wrong. The Shuttle is an amazing piece of technology, no matter what your opinion is. And, it seems the failures of Columbia, and Challenger were a failure of the wetware between the ears of certain people at NASA.

I know that there will be horrible accidents on our way into space. We’re walking on the bleeding edge of our technology, that is always incredibly dangerous.

I sympathize with your reaction, and understand it.

But along with the glory of riding fire into the sky comes the responsibility to understand what went horribly wrong sometimes.