Space Shuttle Challenger - 25th Anniversary of the Tragedy

I was staying at a friend’s place. He and his wife had gone to work and I was just getting breakfast when the wife called me and said “Turn on the TV!”

I think that, for me personally, this was the first time “Turn on the TV!” heralded something bad happening to the country, but it wouldn’t be the last.

I’m relying on internet cites for my information (dammit Jim, I’m a singer, not a physicist). According to Wikipedia (not, I know, the most rigorous of scientific sources) some of the PEAPs air supply was also used, in an amount roughly consistent with the length of descent. That source seems to be this book by one R. Mike Mullane, of whom I know nothing. No mention is made in the excerpt of oxygen consumption, so I don’t know where that comes from. There’s also the mention of the electrical system switches at Mike Smith’s position. Do you know anything of them?

[quote=“Duckster, post:30, topic:569283”]

It was my day off. I watched the launch. Then …

The live broadcast was the only time ever that one could distinctly hear the voice on the loudspeakers where families of the astronauts state, “The Shuttle has exploded…” followed by a screen shot of one set of parents look at each other in bewilderment upon hearing/seeing what just happened.

Unquote]

Out on the West Coast, I was still asleep but my mom woke me up saying “something might have happened to the Space Shuttle”. When I saw the video I just knew… your heart just goes down to your stomach.

A short while later, (days, a week?) I got a call from a friend’s firm in California asking if I would be willing to be on-call to be part of a team to search the debris field (back in the day I was a Marine Surveyor/Hydrographer). As a professional, I would have gone if needed, but I sure didn’t feel like it would be anything but a grim project.

Very moving tribute. Fitting music too.

I was NASA-obsessed as a teenager. Though living in the UK, I had lived in Houston as a kid and knew several astronauts. I had walked inside the Shuttle prototype at Johnson Space Center, I had Shuttle food on display in my room. When I was 14 I persuaded my parents to put Shuttle wallpaper all over my room.

That day I came home from school and was watching some crap TV or other when there was a newsflash, cutting straight to the fireball, then showing the disbelieving faces of the people in the crowd. Friends of my family, working for NASA, had been at the launch.

I went into my room, in silence, and slowly tore the wallpaper off the wall. That strangely organic shape of smoke and fire, the contrail leading to a ball with two curling antennae coming out of it, haunted me for a while. I drew a huge poster-size picture of it in art class, listened for a long time to Last Rendez Vous by Jean Michel Jarre, the sax solo for which was meant to have been played in zero G by Ron McNair, and eventually I was exorcised.

Bumped.