I remember plainly where I was; I was at school (my junior year) working in the library - upstairs. The school happened to have access to the feed that was being sent out for education purposes, and it was on in the science department - and the library media room.
I could see the TV from where I was…I don’t seem to recall actually watching it, but I think I remember one of the librarians, maybe, making an exclamation. I ran downstairs, and that’s when I saw it for the first time. About the same time I got downstairs, the principal came on the PA system and announced what had happened - and a moment of silence.
The next thing I remember I was in class. I think I have a vague recollection of the bell sounding very, very loud. I also remember having a poem trying to form itself in my brain - I wrote lots of (mostly bad) poetry back then. It formed itself up…I was in Algebra 2 class, and wrote it in class. I think the teacher may have called on me, but I was pretty unresponsive, and I’m not sure I could answer.
When school let out, I went home & typed out the poem. (I went looking for it tonight in the box that has a lot of my old writings in it; unfortunately it seems to be gone. I think there was something about Seven Brave Souls - that might have been the title - but I can’t remember it now.)
The next morning, the radio show I listened to was discussing it. I called in before school, explained that I had written a poem about it, and that I wanted to hear a song that seemed appropriate to me for some reason. The DJ let me read my poem, and went right into my chosen song - “Russians” by Sting. I still don’t quite know why I chose that song, unless it was the haunting melody of it, and the message of “we are all the same underneath”.
So today I remember. I remember the sorrow, I remember the loss, and I remember the fact that we kept going.
I was in fifth grade. One of the faculty members went running from classroom to classroom. When she opened the door to each, all she said was, “The Challenger just blew up! Everybody needs to go to the A/V room.”
We all got up and shuffled down the hallway to the room adjacent to the library and sat down on the floor. One single TV was on. I watched with whatever horror a 10-year-old could muster as the video was replayed of the triumphant 75 seconds of the launch of the First Schoolteacher in Space.
Then, tragedy. Disbelief. Incomprehensible loss. Seven people I never knew…gone. Seven families broken.
I listened to the entire recording of the incident tonight on the radio, and I could feel the tears coming.
Then I explained to my son, who is nine, what had happened when I was about his age. As I told the story, I realized that I can’t remember ever talking about the Challenger explosion to someone who hadn’t had the memory burned on his brain already.
I cried nearly uncontrollably as I told him that every astronaut had died without ever knowing what was happening.
I felt all the sadness and loss all over again as I remembered that Christa McAuliff’s (sp?) family had been so proud of her and how she went through all that training only for all of it to end in one tragic second. I will never forget the footage of her mother with her hands over her mouth at the moment the shuttle exploded with her daughter on board, not knowing what had happened…not knowing that she was about to find out that the last time she spoke to Christa was the last time she would ever speak to Christa.
Even now, as I type this, I can feel my throat tightening and the tears welling up.
I was watching in my kindergarten classroom. I was five and a half, and my mom was eight months pregnant. It was the first time I remember being genuinely afraid.
Having come home for lunch, was standing in the kitchen with my hand on the open fridge door, looking back under the cabinets toward the TV. I can still see and hear Peter Jenning relaying the news so vividly. I well remember the shock and the despair.
In the 3rd grade Mrs. Lindens class. The other 3rd grade teacher was an alternate so we were already heavily envolved in the shuttle. After watching it on tv, we all got sent home. My mom got sent home from work also. Thinking back that was odd. Even during Sept. 11 we didn’t get sent home. Or rather, no one I knew got sent home.
I was a kindergartener… I was sitting in the bath at home when it happened. My mother was in the kitchen with her little television turned on, and she made a noise. I called to her, asking what had happened.
I was at work in Jacksonville. It was lunch and we were playing Hearts in my cubicle. A couple of guys had gone out on the roof to see the launch (when it was clear, we could see the Shuttle streaking up) and they came in and said somthing happened. We all went out to look at the odd contrails, then back in to turn on a tiny TV one of the supervisors had in his cube.
That was pretty much the end of work for that day…
I was going from one customer site to another that day. I was in Norcross, GA, repairing equipment. When I got in my car, I heard the reports on the radio. At my next stop, the customers had the tv on. We all stood together and watched the reports and grieved over what had happened.
Later in the day when I was down at the parts center, I called up my sister and she and I commiserated for a long time. We’re both big fans of the space program.
I was on my honeymoon on the Oregon coast. We were packing up and getting ready to leave when the owners of our hotel came pounding on our door. We opened the door and the first words out of their mouths were “Turn on the TV! The Challenger exploded!”
So, we turned on the TV and stood there with the hotel owners watching the tragedy. I remember feeling disbelief and incredible sadness.
I was born in 1954. Some of my earliest memories revolve around the space program. My parents weren’t science junkies, but when the early Mercury shots were going up, always so early in the morning, my folks would get us out of bed to watch. They said “You need to remember this.”
I loved watching launches on TV. When I was fourteen people first walked on the moon. As Armstrong came down the LEM’s ladder, I was so keyed up that I literally could not see it. My brain would not make sense of the images my eyes were sending it.
I didn’t see the launch of the Challenger but was at a doctor’s appointment. I came home and turned on the TV, and Dan Rather was on, which I found odd for that time of the morning. Then I heard the words “shuttle”, “explosion”, “accident”, and so on. I couldn’t believe it. This was supposed to end like Apollo 13, with the guys coming home safely. Sure there had been a fatal accident before, but that was on the* ground*. Doesn’t make sense of course, but nothing was making sense then.
There was a video shot of the high school where McAuliffe taught. Kids were in the auditorium, watching the launch on a big screen. They had noisemakers and pointy party hats on. Then their mouths were hanging open in horror. Somehow that particular combo of sorrow while wearing a pointy hat got to me and I cried. I’m teary again as I type this.
I was a junior in High School and already a space nut. My chemistry teacher had wheeled in a TV so we could watch the launch live. We all sat stunned, and I don’t think we left the classroom for a couple of hours.
I was working night shift, and we had plans to spend the day partying with another couple. When we got there, he said, “Come watch this, I can’t believe it.” I went inside, and they were replaying the explosion. I was horrified the first few times, but after the fifth time they showed the parents’ faces, I was furious. Exploiting the pain of people who just watched their daughter die is absolutely inexcusable. Somebody at CBS should have been fired over that, but they probably weren’t.
The air went out of the party, and we just went home.
I was in 8th grade, and it was a cold morning. I got to school, and went to the library to get warm before school started. I remember so well how when I opened the door, it was dark inside, and about 40 people were in there staring at a TV that had been brought in. I stood at the back of the crowd and watched until classes started.
I had a TA hour at the grade school next door, and I remember wandering around, doing my little errands, and there was a TV just sitting out in the hall, playing the news and that moment over and over, but there was no one to see it but me.
There had been so much excitement over the whole ‘teacher in space’ thing, and the schools had all been paying a lot of attention to that particular launch. I remember all the competition over which teacher would be chosen, and one class from somewhere wrote that their teacher should go because he was a member of the Flat Earth society. And all the school kids that could possibly go to the launch were there, watching it happen.
I was a junior in high school. Lunch period was over, and I had trig class. We shuffled in, sat down, chatted and laughed the way high school kids normally do. Our teacher came in, said good afternoon, sit down, quiet down everybody, and then he started to write the first problem on the board. He had just started when the PA system clicked on. Our principal told us the news. I can remember one line very clearly: “…it’s believed there are no survivors.” And I thought, no shit, Sherlock. (I later found out that a parachute had been spotted, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that the astronauts had all died.)
Our trig teacher stopped writing. He tapped the chalk against the board a few times, and then he said, “I can’t teach. Just - just talk quietly.” Sometimes he put his head down on his desk, the rest of the time he just stared into space. Nobody said much. Nobody cried, either, though I’m sure I’m not the only one who wanted to.
The rest of the school day was strange and very quiet.
When I got home, I turned on the TV and just watched the news reports again and again. (My sister, as I recall, was pissed because she wanted to watch MTV. She ended up going to her room and listening to music.) I did that until supper.
For years after that, if footage of the explosion came on as part of a TV show, I had to close my eyes or look away. I still wince.
I also remember how my dad ranted angrily about the way NASA officials had ignored warnings about the o-rings and gone ahead anyway, because it would look bad to delay the launch. I don’t remember Feynman’s name, though I’m sure it was mentioned. We were all space geeks in our family and were always watching launches and stuff. My aunt works for JPL and used to send us neat items like Galileo mugs or hypercube t-shirts.
Although I didn’t realize at the time, and my dad didn’t say anything at that point, the Challenger disaster directly affected us and for other people in our town. We had moved a year or so before, so that my dad could transfer to this great new job; the Challenger was going to be stored at the local Air Force Base, and he was going to take care of the computers for that job (among other things). So it took a large chunk of his job with it, and over the next few years a lot of my friends moved away as their parents transferred or got other jobs at other bases. We hung on for a while, but Dad’s job dwindled and eventually disappeared.
I was a senior in high school, sitting in English class. We weren’t watching it, they did an announcement over the intercom about it.
Reading Fark the other night, I read an article about it. The Fark headline went something like “20 years ago, the Challenger did not explode, killing all the astronauts immediately, with millions of people watching live.” And it’s true, it didn’t explode- it broke apart. The astronauts didn’t die instantly- they most likely lived until their compartment hit the water, and very few people were watching it live- the news coverage had broken away and after it happened, started showing the tape of it.
