[QUOTE=E-Sabbath]
I happened to be at home, sick. We had CNN, and I was as much a space junkie then as I could be.
I saw it live.
Damn it. /QUOTE]
Me, too. I had the flu. My uncle was a tech-buff, and we had one of the early satallite dish systems.
I remember I was eating ice cream, and the bite I had on my spoon had melted away by the time I tore my eyes away from the TV. I remember that I cried. I remember that I asked my mom endless questions she couldn’t answer.
I remember I made a sympathy card with construction paper and mailed it “To: Nasa in Florida.” (I sometimes wonder if it made it to its destination.)
I was a sophomore in high school. One of our school’s science teachers (biology & physics) was an alternate for the mission, so he was there when it happened.
I didn’t actually see it; I heard about it from someone in the hall. Just about every class that day had TVs going, and the teacher who co-taught my biology class with the alternate was visibly upset.
One rather nasty thing I remember was that the alternate wasn’t terribly popular among the students, and I heard several of them bemoan his not being selected for the mission. I never really cared much for him either, but I had nothing but sympathy for the poor man that day. I can only imagine how he must have felt.
5th grade, in class. I remember somebody from the Principal’s office coming by and whispering into my teacher’s ear. She then told us the sad news. I’d say about half the class didn’t know what she was talking about. We didn’t get let out of school early, but I ran home from the bus stop to watch the news. I stayed parked in front of the tv for the rest of the day.
I was always a aviation and space nut, but the Challenger accident sparked an intense interest in engineering. Later that year for a 6th grade science fair project I actually did a presentation on the O-rings, their manufacture and failure modes. I had hand-drawn diagrams and paper mache’ models of the o-ring assemblies and and paper-model of the Space Shuttle that I assembled from a kit! So the Challenger was definitely the #1 factor in my eventually going to University for Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering.
I was in a lab, the instructor stuck his head in and said the shuttle blew up. I wasn’t sure if he meant just setting on the pad or what and asked him if it killed the astronauts. He looked at me like I had 4 heads and green hair and said something about yeah, it blew up in flight.