Posted on 02/01/2010 11:10:50 AM PST by Talkradio03
January morning 24 years ago, Corydon optometrist Jack Moss raised his new video camera to the sky over central Florida and captured one of the darkest moments in American space exploration the explosion of the shuttle Challenger. In the videotape, a stream of white smoke behind the climbing shuttle shoots into view but Moss, his wife and a neighbor noticed immediately that something was amiss when the channel separated into two streams.
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Thank you for posting the picture.
I remember that terrible day vividly. I also remember that President Reagan gave a touching, beautiful speech about it. That has always stuck with me.
ping to view at home
manned mission to Mars: expensive, unnecessary hogwash
manned mission to the Moon and Moonbase: only necessary if other nations see it as a military advantage and are aiming there.
orbiting manned space stations for science: mandatory
Thank you for posting the link to that speech. Wow. Reagan was such a strong comforting figure - I wish we had that kind of leader now.
Awesome speech.
I remember that day very well as I was getting my very first Cell phone installed in a car. I was watching the TV at the service center for the Cell Company.
Watching the video of Reagan from 1/28/86, I remembered how I cried when he spoke these words.
I cried agian watching the video 24 years later, realizing what a great person and President we had in Ronald Reagan, and that Obama could never exhibit the empathy and leadership of Ronald Reagan.
I was watching from St. Augustine, it was a heartbreaking sight to see.
That’s because he not only acted like an adult, he actually WAS an adult.
Our current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a child pretending to be an adult. He’s effectively a 12 or 13 year old left home alone for the first time.
I could not agree more.
Moved the viewer back up and immediately knew something was wrong but it took a couple of seconds to really wrap my mind around it. Over the speakers they had out there came the launch officers voice, very calmly and evenly saying "we have experienced a major malfunction." I spontaneously burst out "Major malfunction???" Then I realized the inappropriateness of my outburst and fell silent. So did the NASA launch officer. Nothing more came from their speakers.
Bad day and very strange. They locked the causeway down for about two hours and people just milled about, listened to their radios and some wept. I ended up jump starting several cars that had run their batteries down with their radios.
I remember watching that live on TV. That is still one of his best speeches. He was holding back tears as he spoke to the camera.
I was just a few months old when the Challenger blew. Obviously no idea what was going on.
As dangerous as it is though, I’d give whatever internal organs I could to get on a flight into space.
I was a technician at the time working on DOD related projects. I was in the shop working when the Challenger went down. The investigation that followed convinced me to make a career decision I will never regret: I will never, EVER become a manager. I became an engineer, then a programmer. Now I do both. My boss asked me a few months ago if I would be willing to become manager. I told him “no way”. I will never “take off my engineers hat and put on my manager’s hat”. The shuttle engineers were heroes. The managers were criminals and one or more of them should have gone to fracking jail for what happened.
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