Texas museum honors fallen Columbia crew

HEMPHILL, Texas – Space dreams still fly high here in this Piney Woods community, where residents and senior NASA officials, astronauts and their families will gather today to dedicate a new museum for the space shuttle Columbia and its lost crew, including Cheney’s Michael Anderson.

The opening of the $600,000 facility comes on the eighth anniversary of the spacecraft’s breakup over East Texas. It left a debris trail that stretched from just east of Dallas to southwestern Louisiana.

Hemphill residents say the NASA-built displays and poignant, family-donated memorabilia that fill the 3,400-foot building – everything from crew members’ dog tags to favorite books, hiking boots, flight suits and funeral flags – are nothing short of a miracle.

“It’s been like that from the very beginning – through the searching, with the recovery of all of the astronauts, with all that’s happened,” said museum organizer Martha Cooper. “God has kept opening doors.”

Families and colleagues of the fallen astronauts say they want to pay tribute to Hemphill and a surrounding region of heroes, ordinary people who recovered Columbia and its crew and helped find answers allowing a return to space flight. Hemphill, 230 miles southeast of Dallas, was at the center of the debris field.