Mission Control: “Columbia, Houston we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last.”
Columbia: “Roger, uh, …”

Seven astronauts, including the first Israeli in space, were lost Saturday when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in the skies of Texas. The incident occurred at an altitude of some 200,000 feet, shortly after reentry and 15 minutes before Columbia had been scheduled to land at Cape Canaveral.

Apart from the tragic loss of life in this incident, this could ultimately end the run of the Space Shuttle. The second shuttle loss from a fleet of 5 will probably see NASA not make another space mission in the next 24 months. That said, the International Space Station currently has a crew of three on board, and a return to Earth would either be made by a Space Shuttle or a Russian Soyuz vehicle. However, NASA would ground its craft until it ultimately works out the cause of the contingency that occured today.

Edit: There is a lot of major news coverage for this catastrophe (as one would expect), so I’m not going to go deeper into this. However, one link of interest is Steve MacLaughlin’s informed coverage.