> That it wasn't even now fills me with horror and I shudder to think about it. The crew's final moments must have been sheer terror. Having been in a situatio

> That it wasn't even now fills me with horror and I shudder to think about it. The crew's final moments must have been sheer terror. Having been in a situation where I thought I was about to die (head-on collision on an icy country highway), that wasn't my experience. When I saw the other car in my lane I was hit with a wall of adrenaline; I experienced the "bullet time" that you see sometimes in movies, where tiiime slooowwws doooowwwwnnn; and I felt like I was processing things calmly and rationally, thinking about what they tell you to do in that situation in driver's training, and even when it became clear that there was nothing I could do to avoid the oncoming car, I simply thought, "I wonder what it's like to die?" (Now having been in a few more accidents, and experiencing "crumple zones", I'd probably just be thinking about whether the car would be totaled.) The professional astronauts will have been put through loads of training for all kinds of contingencies; there's a very good chance they had similar responses, and a decent chance that McAuliffe did too.