It is now. It wasn’t at the time.
After John Glenn went up in the shuttle at age 77, some of the women who trained in the early Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo programs were re-evaluated for flight, but none of them met modern health or fitness guidelines. Yes, there were women in those programs! The best known amongst them are Jerrie Cobb and Wally Funk.
Christa McAuliffe’s parents started an educational foundation promoting knowledge of space flight and astronomy to children, which includes “Space Camp” and it continues to this day even though they have both died. Is that what you’re thinking about?
BTW, several months after the Challenger explosion, there was a largely forgotten movie called “Space Camp” where some teenagers accidentally launched the space shuttle. The studio was criticized for this, until it was pointed out that movies are made a year or two before they are released, and the movie had already wrapped and was in editing at the time of the explosion.
p.s. Regarding the Columbia disaster: That, too was inevitable.
Several years ago, I worked with a woman who at the time lived in Texas, and her husband was in the National Guard and their unit went out to pick up shuttle and body parts. Her husband found “something”, although out of respect to the victim, I won’t post it here. I will say who and what it was if you PM me.
One thing that happened that wasn’t publicized is that they were looking for 7 bodies, but found 9. Another searcher found the bodies of two people who turned out to be victims of a serial killer that was operating in the region at the time, and those people hadn’t even been reported missing. :eek:
That’s exactly right. Space exploration was already on a downslide. I would have loved to see a manned base on the moon myself, but really there was no way to justify the expense of something like that. They were hoping to jump-start the public imagination with Christa McAuliffe. There may have technically been civilians who went up before her, but they were all involved in the industry somehow. Even Congressman Jake Garn, who flew the year before the Challenger disaster, was head of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that dealt with Nasa and had extensive aviation experience. McAuliffe was to be the first “average Joe” to go into space. Just an ordinary schoolteacher. But even if her mission had succeeded, I don’t think the shuttle program would have taken a different track.
I was 23 and was very affected by it. I was a reporter — actually editor at a small-town weekly. Christa McAuliffe as the first teacher in space was such a huge news story to me. And at the same time they were talking about “the first journalist in space.” Being young and idealistic, I thought myself the perfect candidate and was actually intending to write something very eloquent (of course ;)) and persuasive to NASA putting forth my qualifications.
Of course that was all off, after the explosion. I wrote something for the paper at the time that was probably pretty naive, but I felt it was the death of a dream, and felt very sad and patriotic about it. Then it was revealed as a screwup and I felt foolish for my “gave their life for their country” tone I had employed.
My high school physics teacher was one of the 5 finalists for that seat on the flight. I had even written a recommendation letter for him. He was one of the most influential teachers I had ever known so I had gone back to the school to watch the launch with him and the class.
I can still hear him say “That’s not supposed to happen.” in a stunned, quiet voice.
So yeah, unforgettable for me.
It’s unforgettable to me, but probably because I happened to be watching it live on TV, so I didn’t learn it from a news report after the fact.
Was in my 20s and saw it live on TV. I felt the assassination attempt on Reagan was more shocking among events of the 1980s. But the Challenger catastrophe didn’t seem any worse than the Apollo fire, despite the loss of more people.
An effect on me personally was realizing what huge sums of money were being spent on something with such a high failure rate, and knowing how starved science programs at universities were for money.
Or maybe he’s confusing all of the above with Boris Yeltsin on a tank?
Civilians on the shuttle wasn’t so routine back then. McAuliffe was one of the first. Wasn’t she THE first civilian on a shuttle?
They had some big competitive competition for choosing who it would be, with lots of adventurous people applying. There was public debate over what kind of person (meaning, what profession) should be chosen, and it was settled on a school teacher for the symbolic educational value. She had prepared “lessons from space” that she was going to broadcast to the nation’s (and the world’s) schoolchildren from the shuttle.
All of this had been massively hyped by NASA and the media for quite some time before the launch. So the whole nation was all het up for it. Because of all the hype and hoopla and the resulting over-the-top media attention, it was all the more of a shock when it all went kablooie. That no doubt had a lot to do with it being seen as such a major disaster (which would have been the case anyway, as it was our first major actual in-flight space launch disaster).
The news coverage for the rest of the day, as many have mentioned, was non-stop wall-to-wall. I mentioned in another recent thread (or was it earlier in this thread) that the newshawks went to the limits in covering every imaginable angle, however remote. CBS managed to dig up (almost literally) the guy who broadcast that hysterical live coverage of the Hindenburg going kablooie way back when, and interviewed him for his reaction. (Being about 80-something at the time, he didn’t get hysterical this time.)
And they all dug up models of the space shuttle from somewhere, placed on their desks in the studio while they reported.
It struck a chord with me because of the “first teacher in space” thing. There was this sense that space travel had become so routine that anybody could go into space and that soon there would be the ability for anybody to take a trip on the shuttle. I was 21 so I was too young for the prior NASA disaster and it just was such a shocking reminder of just how risk it all was. Inaddition, that was a VERY BAD day for me in other ways, so that may be why I remember it so clearly.
It basically had the same impact on me as a large airliner crash (with 100 or so people dead). I had heard of earlier space disasters (such as the 1967 fire on board during launch rehearsal where Gus Grissom, Edward White II, Roger Chaffee were killed) and I basically put space disasters in the same category as large airplane disasters. When I was a young kid space flights were a big deal to me, but by the time Challenger came around I wasn’t paying any attention to them–including Challenger and its PR gimmick of a teacher in space.
Yeah, Michael Dukakis. :smack:
That’s what I meant.
I was sad for the shuttle crew, but I wouldn’t say it was a huge personal deal to me as (sorry if this sounds cold) objectively it was about the overall impact of a miltary cargo plane crash, although quite a bit more expensive. What makes it unforgettable to me is mostly the spectacular images images of the orbiter breaking up.
I was an adult at the time of JFK and all of the things after that were also important to me.
I think what made it a memerable event is that, due to the whole “Teacher in Space” aspect, you had thousands of schoolkids watching the event live when it happened, rather than hearing about it after the fact. Seeing it happen in front of you makes a pretty big impact.
McAuliffe definitely wasn’t the first civilian on the Shuttle. Ever hear of Loren Acton, who flew in 1985? No, you haven’t, because his presence on that flight was completely unremarkable.
Agreed. There was civilian scientists on earlier flights. In fact, there was one on that Challenger flight too. McAuliffe was the first “regular” person to go into space. The plan was for her to teach lessons from the shuttle that would be broadcast to classrooms throughout America.
I remember where I was when I heard the news. I was in the Power Shop on board the USS Ranger and we were just getting our coffee. Sometime later that day, I heard someone make the infamous 7-up joke and I barely remember doing it but apparently I dropped him without thinking with one punch. I’ve never been capable of doing that and not sure why it happened. I was numb that day and very sad.
I guess I was always a space nut as a kid. I would have liked to have been part of NASA but never dreamed of being an astronaut. So the Challenger explosion really got to me.
For me the big news events of my life were Thurman Munson dying in his plane crash*, John Lennon’s murder, the Challenger Explosion, Tiananmen Square and 9/11.