It ranked with JFK’s assassination for its impact on me.
32 at the time, I was in my office when I heard a shriek from the office next door. It was my secretary, who had the radio on to an account of the launch. She was quickly 'round the corner to my office and, standing in the doorway, said, “The shuttle blew up!”
I remember she was in a semi-crouch with a “What should we do?” look on her face.
Nothing to do, of course.
Stepping into her office, I listened to the announcer for a very few seconds before I realized that they hadn’t even hit the water yet. He was describing the fall of the debris. It struck me that I was a thousand miles away and knew of the astronauts’ demise while it was still, quite probably, impending.
Shock. Depressed.
At lunch I went to the department store across Main Street. With about 50, I don’t know - maybe 100, other people, I stood and watched the endless replays of the footage on about a dozen TVs in the electronics department. No sound on the TVs and absolute silence from the crowd.
I went back to my office and sent a cable to President and Mrs. Reagan - it was both a condolence and encouragement for the space program. It was really probably just my pitiful attempt to do something.
I was on a plane from Houston to Los Angeles to visit the place my parent,s friends. I was only four years old but I remember getting off the plane and hearing about it in the lobby.
I was 18 years old, in Air Force basic military training, at Lackland AFB, Texas, where, interestingly enough, I am at the present time, for the first time since then.
Each flight that graduated painted a mural on a section of the dorm walls, and ours was a Challenger memorial. Since I’ve been here, I’ve often wished I could remember my squadron and flight numbers. I would’ve liked to go back and see it.
I can remember everything clearly frm that day. I was in my Grade 2 class. We were watching the shuttle launch, which had us excited for two reasons. 1 - we were watching TV in class. 2 - we got to miss our CTBS tests. (Canadian dopers will know what I am talking about)
I remember the launch vividly. I remmeber everyone’s reactions, including those of the class goof off, Billy Gingras, who said “Cool” when it blew up. He got a smack fom the teacher and was sent to the principal’s right away. The rest of us just sat there wondering what we were seeing. Never in a million years did any of us expect that anything like this would happen.
After the explosion, I started reading everything I could about space travel, exploration, and the technology used, if for no other reason, than to learn what had happened.
I also remember watching the Columbia disaster with a heavy heart. I do agree with previous posters, though, that it seemed more impersonal than the way that the Challenger explosion affected most people. Part of it may be, I didn’t watch the events unfold live on TV.
I was in 5th grade, science class. News came over the PA, and we watched on a TV later that day. I remember that many of my friends’ parents worked either at JSC or for one of the contractors who serviced JSC. Many of them dealt with the shuttle program.
It affected me deeply – like many here I was a big 10 year old space junky. I had a subscription to Smithsonian’s Air and Space and a poster of all of the astronauts on my wall. I eagerly watched all of the news, I watched the hearings on the O-rings, and I began to idolize Richard Feynmann after the famous ice water stunt he pulled. It led to a great interest in physics and science, and it is one of the reasons I still am in science to date.
I think for many of us it was the first televised media saturation of bad news. I was too young to clearly remember the Iran hostages, and that developed over a year. I can remember Reagan getting shot, and that was all televised, but in the end the news was good. The disaster was so bad, so shocking, and every moment of it was caught on television. And replayed to us, the receptive audience, countless numbers of times. As others have said, it was our first taste of the feelings of 9/11.
Columbia was bad, but more surreal. It came down just north of us. I was up early that Saturday, and I watched the early news of pieces falling in familiar towns. I went to work and another grad student said that he had seen it on the horizon on his way in. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad because now we are much more hardened to saturation televised bad news and perhaps because it wasn’t the first time something of this nature had happened.
I was also a junior in high school, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and it wasn’t a snow day for us! I had one “class” where I was a teacher’s aide and I had just walked into her classroom and she told me.
I wasn’t particularly affected by it, to be honest. I remember thinking “oh that’s terrible” in the same way you’d think that about any tragedy. But this wouldn’t have been anywhere near the top of my hierarchy of tragedies.
3rd grade. Our teacher had been upset because she couldn’t get a TV, so we could see like many of the kids were excited about. She even wanted to bring one from home, but her husband was against the idea.
So instead of seeing it, we heard about it. Kids in other classrooms, crying, I mean- there was a lot of crying. Any and all interest I ever had in the space program left me that day.
I was in 8th grade, at school, standing outside looking up into the sky watching the launch.
Here is a map of how close my school was to the launch site.
I haven’t been able to watch a shuttle launch since. Oh, sure, once they are up safely I can watch replays… but the live coverage, no way. I still periodically have nightmares about it.
I wanted to add that they pulled TVs into the common areas at the school and no one did much of anything for the rest of the day but watch the replays over and over. Since we lived just a little way from the Space Center, a lot of the kids had family working for NASA, etc… it was really really weird. One of the kids in my class found a piece of the shuttle on the beach (a small piece) a week or two later. (Yes, he called it in–he didn’t keep it.)
There was something just so unreal about watching that launch… I mean I’d seen several before… wasn’t much of a big deal, mostly it was cool because it was an excuse to go outside during English class. It was really weird seeing airplane contrails for a while after that, too…
For Challenger, I was in college. I had no classes that day and was home watching TV when they interrupted with the bulletin. I live in Central Florida, and I think I remember that I went outside to see if I could see anything. I really don’t know for sure. I was just that shocked. And of course, it was quite a few years ago.
For Columbia, we got up early and hubby turned on the TV as usual. When the story came on, I thought it was another memorial story for Challenger. Nasty, sinking feeling when I realized it wasn’t.
It’s hard to describe the emotional impact either of those had on me. They weren’t on the order of the pain and shock of 9/11, but the Challenger blew me away. We were so blasé about launches, there had been so many successful ones.
I was 25, at work at my job in North Carolina. I had gone to the restroom, and heard some other people talking about something that had occurred, but I didn’t hear them clearly, or didn’t process the info, or something.
I got back to my desk and someone said “The shuttle exploded”. The first thought I had was that they meant the shuttle bus that transported people between locations of our company. I think it took me less than a second to realize that was not what they’d meant.
Almost more than the explosion itself, I remember hearing about the aftermath - punishment of whistleblowers who tried to have the launch delayed, complete lack of punishment for those who overrode those recommendations…
I think I also responded differently to each disaster was because, well, like I said I was nine when we lost Challenger. You know how important teachers are to kids that age. My third grade teacher had even applied for the program, though I don’t know how far she got.
And at least Columbia had completed a mission. The people on Challenger didn’t get that chance.
That was my sisters 16th birthday. We had a snow day so we were just hanging out watching videos when our Mom called. She was at work and had heard about the explosion on the radio. I was 13. We had paid alot of attention to the space program that year because I had to do a science report based on it so it was really a shock.
I was in 6th grade, and sick from a bad cold, so I watched it from the couch in the living room. Strangely enough, I was also stuck at home with a cold on the last day of Columbia’s flight.
In the field at Fort Bragg, North Carolina during a joint USMC/Army training mission (I was a Marine). One of the old Gunneys had the Comm guys put him an antenna up a tree for his little b/w TV. I recall ducking into the CP tent and seeing the replayed footage of the explosion a few minutes after it happened.
January 28, 1986 ws my 22nd birthday. I turned 40 yesterday and every birthday I think of those guys, and always will.
I was driving up to the University (I was in my second Gad school) that cld morning. I witched on the radio and learned that the shuttle had “crashed”. I fiddled with the knobs to ry to get more information, but had no luck. It wasn’t until later that I learned that what happened couldn’t be called a “crash”.
It was very scary and sad – I’d co-authored two papers with one of the Mission Specialists.
I was a college freshman, studying for an Environmental Physics test in the student lounge and watched the shuttle take-off. I then ran up the stairs to finish studying in the lab. Right as I sat down, another student came running in the room, “Challenger exploded on lift-off.” I laughed at him, I had just seen it take off. They were OK when I started up the stairs. Then the professor came in with a radio. I couldn’t believe it.
I was in college, and had an internship with a grant attached to work at WGBH-TV, the big Boston PBS station. We’d been following the program very closely and were broadcasting the launch live. I remember all the materials and the intricate schedule we’d put together in those pre-Net days so that students could actually talk to Christa live in space. All that stuff was shoved into a folder and put away because it was too painful for the staff to see. And since I spent a lot of time at MIT, I remember the Dr. McNair memorials all over the place, since he’d been one of theirs.
As for the day, I was coming back from a class when somebody mentioned it in the hallway. I went to the TV lounge and people were clustered around, watching, but not saying much. We girls were solemn all day but had to go to class and all, and there wasn’t a huge amount of discussion in classes–the teachers had to start the new semester and that was all there was to it. I remember being surprised but not shocked–I had just finished reading WE REACH THE MOON and vividly remembered the chapter on the Apollo One fire, so between that and fiction like STAR TREK I realized I was psychologically ready for the concept that space travel was dangerous and that, frankly, we’d been damn lucky until then to ‘only’ lose three people. I just thought it was unfortunate that it happened to be the mission with all those kids watching. I was pretty mad when it was found that in this case, it could have been prevented, but surprised even myself with the lack of total shock I had.
I remember smiling with pride and sadness when I noticed that STAR TREK IV was dedicated “To the Seven”. That was sweet.
My house is 65 miles south of the launch complex, and when I was growing up my dad would always tell me about how he was in our front yard and watched it explode. Like many people, he didn’t know it had exploded at first and just thought that something looked different about the launch because he hadn’t remembered the big puff of smoke. I was too young to remember it.
The Columbia accident certainly affected me in a bigger way. I would watch every shuttle launch physically possible when I was growing up because we could see it from our yard, and occasionally we would drive up to KSC and see it even closer. When I was picking which college to attend, I was so excited to find a university I liked. It was in east Orlando, only 35 miles from the launch pad! A quick drive to see launches up close would be heaven for me. But here I am at my university and I still haven’t got to see a launch since I arrived, the fall before the accident. As my luck would have it, I had mandatory class during the liftoff which really sucked. I really hope they start the shuttle program again ahead of schedule so I can enjoy and appreciate the launches, in all their awe and wonder, before I graduate.