Where were you on 28 January 1986?

I was working as a pipefitter on a fertilizer plant in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Our foreman came in at lunch and told us about it.

I was stationed at Shaw AFB near Sumter, S.C. I was working the night shift and my dorm room was right off the dayroom. Some A-- would always come into the dayroom and turn the TV on full blast about 10:00-11:00 a.m. I usually slept through about an hour of that noise before I woke up enough to realize why I wasn’t sleeping well, and would go in the (empty) dayroom to shut off the TV.

This time, however, I picked up on the stress in the voices coming out of the tube. When I went in the dayroom I thought to myself “Oh, damn! I’ll bet the shuttle blew up!” Sure enough, when I could see the screen, they were showing a puff of smoke and that damn solid rocket motor corkscrewing around the sky. I had missed seeing the actual event on TV by just a few seconds.

The rest of that day is sort of a blur, but I recall that no-one at the shop did much work that night. We stood around the break room talking about the disaster and the space program. We were all concerned that NASA and the U.S. Govt. would stop manned spaceflight altogether.

Thank G-d for the Soviets. If they hadn’t had a space program to (seemingly, at least) rival ours, I think it might’ve been a lot longer than 2 years before we sent anyone else up, if ever.

Space exploration is dangerous business, but I still think that there’s quite a lot of value for the whole of humanity to keep going there ourselves, rather than just sending probes.

–SSgtBaloo

I was on the air at KDXU in St. George, Utah.

We had a strobe light hooked up to the ABC Radio Network. If the network sent over a certain series of tones, the strobe would go off and we would know to join the network immediately - a big story was breaking.

I’ve only seen the network “strobe” us twice. Once when Reagan was shot, and when the shuttle blew up.

That was a very surreal experience, being at the head end of breaking news like that. Someone got a portable TV in the control room and we watched it over and over again.

And the aftermath with Morton Thiokol’s O-Rings - they were made in Utah so that was a BIG story.

I was turning 30 - it’s my birthday.

The Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan and I were in Florida on a very belated honeymoon a few weeks earlier, and we saw them fly the Challenger in on the back of that modified 747. And then…

Regards,
Shodan

My sister and I were going to a pottery class in Burbank in the mid-morning. My dad was giving us a ride to the class. My dad and I pulled up in my sister’s driveway to pick her up and she came out to greet us. She simply stated in a deadpan voice, “The space shuttle blew up.” I didn’t believe her. I kept on accusing her of kidding.

I guess we went to the class, but the rest of the day was kind of a blur. I was very upset and couldn’t get it out of my mind. At some point I took a nap and I dreamt about the shuttle. Bad, sad dreams.

My dad didn’t know how to run the VCR, so he compelled me to tape the news coverage of the accident that night on the news. I probably have that tape around somewhere still.

I was 17, living in New Zealand, and like IceWolf I saw it on the morning news. I remember being at first stunned, then deeply saddened as I realised what has happened. Saddened at both the loss of life and, in some sense, the loss of a dream. I am glad that the program was not stopped at that point. I am glad that the astronauts that lost theior lives that day were somehow carried forward by those that followed. As were we all.

I was in sixth grade at the time, in class, when my teacher came in and announced the news.