Out of the Blue: On a picture-perfect Texas morning, the shuttle Columbia was heading home when tragedy struck, leaving the country and the world wondering what went wrong-and honoring the lives of seven brave astronauts.

Correction: 2/12/03

In a Feb. 10 graphic we printed a photo that identified the manufacturer of the shuttle Columbia's nose and wing tiles as BFGoodrich. That company, now known as the Goodrich Corp., did not make the Columbia's nose and wing tiles. NEWSWEEK regrets the errors. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Byline: Evan Thomas

Tony Beasley, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, got up early, along with his wife and mother-in-law, to watch the space shuttle fly overhead. It was a little after 5:45 a.m., California time, 7:45 a.m. at Mission Control in Houston, 8:45 a.m. at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Beasley could see the bright glow of the shuttle as it came over California's Owens Valley, bound for a Florida landing, still 60 miles high, traveling at about 20 times the speed of sound. Then he noticed some bright flashes, just small ones at first. Beasley idly wondered if the shuttle was shedding some debris as it entered the atmosphere. He didn't make much of it; he thought he recalled that space shuttles sometimes lost a few tiles as the craft burned into the atmosphere. But then he noticed a large pulse of light. "It was like a big flare being dropped from the shuttle," he told NEWSWEEK. "It didn't seem normal."

A few minutes later, a few hundred miles to the east in Red Oak, Texas, Trudy Orton heard a boom as she stood on her front porch in the brightening morning. She thought it was a natural-gas explosion. "My house shook and windows rattled." Her dog ran into the house and hid. A neighbor, loading her car, looked up and asked, "What on earth was that?" Orton looked up and saw a white streak of smoke across the sky. "It wasn't a sleek little straight line like the jets make. It was billowing like a puffy cloud."

At the Kennedy Space Center at 9 a.m., ET, the festive crowd--NASA officials, family members of the astronauts, local dignitaries and politicians, even a representative of the Israeli government, on hand to honor Israel's first astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon--eagerly listened for the familiar sonic boom, heralding the arrival of the returning shuttle.…