Richard Scobee
Michael Smith
Ronald McNair
Judith Resnick
Ellison Onizuka
Christa McAuliffe
Gregory Jarvis
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
- My god …
It seems both a lifetime ago and like yesterday.
I somehow managed not to hear about it at school. I was at the desk in the kitchen at home, working on homework, when I heard.
We were watching the launch live sitting around power shop on the Ranger drinking bad coffee.
It was horrific to a space nut like me.
I was in eleventh grade. I would have been at school but it was a snow day so I was at home taking a nap. I found out about the tragedy when one of my mom’s friends called and woke me up.
Who were they again?
Totally joking. I’m a big spaceflight buff and could talk about Challenger for hours. I was home sick that day, playing on my Commodore 64, and turned around to watch when Tom Brokaw broke in to the gameshow my grandmother had on.
I once edited the Wikipedia article about Challenger. It used to say the orbiter “exploded”, which isn’t quite correct. I think I changed it to “disintegrated aerodynamically”. Today it reads “broke apart”, which is a clearer way of putting it.
I was at home with a very high fever, and I thought it was a horrible vision.
I was in high school — second semester of freshman year — and between classes a guy in the hallway with a Walkman radio said that the shuttle had exploded. Walkmans weren’t allowed: the kids who had them weren’t always the most believable, and we figured it was a (really) bad joke. But then shortly after my bio class started, the principal came on the PA and told everyone. I didn’t see the video until after school. It felt completely surreal for days.
I was in elementary school (second grade, I think) in the Orlando area. As was tradition, we went outside to watch the shuttle launch in the sky - even from our distance, we could see the exhaust that marked its path.
I recall my teacher remarking how cool it was that a fellow educator was up there. I distinctly remember the crazy looking eruption. And I remember that my friend, who had returned to the classroom to get a jacket (since it was such a cold morning) tell me about the disaster, since the tv inside the room had announced it. I didn’t initially recognize the strange plum of smoke as something wrong.
For me now, the most horrific part is to realize that the people on board likely survived that explosion, and only died minutes later when they crashed into the ocean. That free fall would have been hell.
Oh, and have you ever seen that great meme about the young black kid who refused to leave a library because he wanted to check out science books, and how he became an astronaut and now the library is named after him?
Well, Dr. McNair was one of the astronauts who died on the Challenger.
My young daughter was so excited to watch the space shuttle on TV until it all went so horribly wrong. “Mommy what happened?”. For those brave souls, she prayed.
I was a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that winter. I’d been a fan of space exploration since I was a little kid, and I was excited about the Challenger launch, but I had a class that morning (business logistics, IIRC), and after class, I walked down Bascom hill, to the office where I had my work-study job.
Once I got there, one of the other work-study students was listening to the radio, on which the breaking news coverage of the disaster, and that’s when and where I learned what had happened.
I was going to college, living at home. I was taking a nap and Mom woke me up to watch the disaster moments after it happened. Yikes.
Rest in Peace
I was getting ready for school, listening to the radio when they broke in with the announcement. I turned on the TV and just cried. Went to school and one of my professors saw me sitting in the hall with a thousand-yard stare and told me to go home and not come back for 48 hours.
Part of me withered that day, joining the piece that crumpled when Apollo 1 happened.
I still have the F104 helmet I won in Elementary school for winning an art contest at the local AFB. My drawing of a Mercury-Redstone rocket launching appealed to the judges, I guess. Always been a space junkie.
I didn’t hear about it for a few days. I was studying in Québec, and we didn’t have a tv in our spartan apartment, or get a newspaper. Since it was snowing out, I didn’t go out for a day or two. Eventually saw an article in a newspaper.
What I remember – and this event is a big example of how flashbulb memories are subject to distortion, so this may not be accurate – is being in the lunchroom in my grammar school and our principal ringing her handbell furiously to get our attention. She starts off in somber tones and the first thing in my head was the thought that the space shuttle exploded. We knew it was going up, but I have no idea why we didn’t watch it, as we’ve watched many other space shuttle missions. It probably had become less of an event by then. I don’t remember much after that. I would have been 10. I remember going to the local Venture (basically like a K-Mart) and seeing all the TVs in the entertainment department tuned to the local news replaying the explosion over and over again.
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!
I remember being on break at work, and my co-worker coming out to tell me, her face aghast.
The human talent, education and knowledge lost were huge. They were the cream of the crop.
Sometimes I forget how much younger I am than the average Doper. I was 4 ½ years old when it happened so I have no memory of it.
However, my brother had been born 7 days prior and my mom was just home from the hospital. She was in the kitchen making a bottle for the new baby when she heard about it on the TV. To this day she says that memory is clearer than any other specific memory of my brothers first week.
I do remember very clearly where I was and what I was doing when I heard about the Columbia disaster.
In my mind, an even more tragic and avoidable disaster.
I was in orchestra class. Mr. Shaefer, our director, told us.