Shuttle Columbia Disaster Remembered

And it was this town that became the epicenter of the search for whatever was left of the shuttle. More than 85,000 pieces that comprised only about 38 percent of the craft were eventually recovered.

In the first few hours after the explosion, no one knew what to expect. Townspeople stood on the street staring at the piece of wing that dropped and was quickly surrounded by National Guardsmen. More than 2,000 volunteers and searchers, including the Guard, U.S. Forest Service workers and NASA engineers, descended on Nacogdoches and its neighboring towns.

Today, Nacogdoches seems to cradle the events of Feb. 1, 2003, and the days that followed with a special reverence.

On a back wall inside the Commercial Bank, the disaster is memorialized in a collage of photographs, newspaper clippings and handwritten notes. "We rember you Columbia," reads one note in a misspelled childish scrawl.

On the other side of the town square, inside a spacious but musty storefront, hundreds of people have visited the "Memories of Columbia" exhibit, which features NASA artifacts, front page reprints, topographic maps of the search grids and a small model of the shuttle carrying bouquets of dried flowers, stuffed teddy bears and notes bidding farewell to Columbia's crew.

"I'll never forget about it, and the people who volunteered never will," Plunkett said. "It was part of something you gave of yourself to help someone else you never knew."

Related Links:

Irene Klotz's blog: Space Diary

NASA remembers Columbia

NASA's space shuttle page