Getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom I flipped awake my sidekick to read the email dreams that it collected as I was busy gathering my own. Sifting past the spam that always seems to fall heavier at night, I noticed the 'CNN Breaking News' that always grabs my attention. I'm always timid about reading these emails: will it be as benign as the FAA ordering an airline to inspect their planes, or was it a declaration of war on Iraq?

"-- NASA reports losing contact with space shuttle Columbia at 9 a.m. EST prior its scheduled landing at 9:16 a.m."

Reading the first few words, I thought I knew how to feel. 'Oh. NASA lost contact with another probe. Sheesh.' Then, 'NASA lost contact with the Shuttle. Wow. That's embarrassing. Reminds me of Spacecamp.' And finally, '16 minutes before landing? Shit.'

And of course, the next email from CNN was sitting there in my inbox, five minutes old:

"-- The space shuttle Columbia, carrying a crew of seven, broke up Saturday morning 200,000 feet above Texas. More soon"

I woke up Rachel to tell her what was going on, remembering just over a year ago on Sept 11 when Ammy woke me up to tell me that 'the world just got crazy.'

Rachel got up and we turned on the TV to a random channel.

Fixating on Rather and Blitzer, by the video clips and the developing story, there was a part of my head sitting in the back of the theater, so to speak, thinking I should feel differently than I did. Yes, I was horrified. Yes, I was stricken. Yet all the while I was comparing this experience to the morning of the Challenger explosion, looking for the reasons why this time the whole morning seemed somehow muted. I didn't need help coping with the tragedy.

I already know what to feel.

And I don't think I'm the only one: Over the course of the day I interacted with a bunch of people, and the only time Columbia even came up was when, after several minutes of talking without any mention of the accident, I asked them if they'd heard the news, just to be sure.

Challenger prepared us for the reality of a shuttle disaster. It reminded us that an astronaut's bravery isn't a hollow thing, and that accidents really can happen. As much as Tufte might have shown that Challenger was preventable, it wasn't because shuttles were inherently safe. Last year there were 15 million commercial aircraft flights in the United States and not a single fatality. When the shuttles were designed, they estimated that there could be a serious mishap (resulting in an RTLS, TAL, AOA, ATO or contingency abort) once every 50 launches.

Beyond Challenger though, 9/11 was the real primer for today. Beyond the fact that Challenger eliminated the surprised shock of such a tragedy, 9/11 gave us a sense of scope. Here was a shock that not only stretched wider, with initial estimates of 20,000 dead lowered to 6,000 and a month later to 3,000, but deeper, as it was just a starting point of a whole new world, and not the shiny kind. I didn't realize just how much we all grew up in the last 16 months until yesterday. Maybe jaded is a better term.

It's terrible to say, but there is some relief in experiencing a closed-end tragedy. The loss of seven lives, a three billion dollar spacecraft, and a dent in space exploration that could last from one to three years; these are all things to make us sad. But at the same time there's a salve in knowing it won't instigate UN resolutions, a half-trillion dollars in new military spending, killing of thousands of enemy troops, and the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction from enemies we're only learning to hate because they hate us.

The tragedy of a space disaster is something I already know how to feel. The emotions it evokes are emotions I can respect within myself and in others. This is sorrow, grief, and moving on. I only wish more tragedies could so easily be dealt with.