Maybe it's the election, but I had thought I was watching plenty of news lately. This post made me look up Columbia and I see that the 5th anniversary of its crash was Feb 1st, 2008. Funny thing is, I didn't hear a thing about it then. Did anyone else? Or was this ignored by the media in the runup to Feb 3rd (superbowl) and Feb 5th (super Tuesday)? Seems that NASA was reminded with this disaster to pay attention to the Feynman suggestion that shuttle failures will happen on the order of 1% of the time, as suggested by its engineers. Glad the Mars landed proposed by Bush still has time to be well-designed. ;) BTW, the Iraq war also started about 5 years ago, on March 19. Maybe that event helped to squelch public morning for Columbia at the time. Sure seemed like it wasn't in the headlines for long. Or maybe, like me, everyone was just to sad to be reminded of Challenger and didn't want to think about Columbia.