Remembering the Challenger - 19 Years

[silverleaf]

http://www.cnn.com/resources/video.almanac/1986/challenger/challenger.lg.mov

The 25th mission in the Space Shuttle program, flown by the Challenger, ended tragically with the loss of its seven crew members and destruction of the vehicle when it exploded shortly after launch.

Back row from left to right: Ellison Onizuka, mission specialist; Christa McAuliffe, payload specialist; Gregory Jarvis, payload specialist; and Judith Resnik, mission specialist.

Front row from left to right: Michael Smith, pilot; Francis Scobee, commander; and Ronald McNair, mission specialist.

[RadioAstronomer]

Yes. I was in a mission control center monitoring the launch.

[M Kehoe]

I miss the Texas-Wisconsin Border Cafe.

Widow maker chili, yum.

5.56mm

[SirLurkedalot]

I was home sick too (8th grade) Saw it on TV. I can still feel the shock of seeing the explosion and knowing that was'nt a normal launch.

[truthkeeper]

I certainly do remember. For one thing, it was my wedding anniversary. I was ironing in front of the tv, talking to my mother on the phone with the audio muted, and watching the plume of white smoke. I made some lame comment like "Mom...I think something went wrong with the spaceship" before settling down to watch for hours.

[suzyq5558]

I sure do remember! I was bringing my hubby at the time some breakfast where he was working in a housing devlopment and listening to KLOS with those bozos mark and brian and thought it was a stunt they were pulling intill i got the worksite and everyone was in shock and a couple were crying.

[foreshadowed at waco]

Thanks for your correction...I never knew that Peggy Noonan lifted those words from a previous author...live and learn.

[Fedupwithit]

I was in 8th grade Science class, and we had the TV set up in class to watch the liftoff...Mr Bishop was the teacher...one of the most surreal things I have ever watched...

until 9/11 came along..

[Nowhere Man]

I was ill that day so I stayed home from college. I was 19 at the time. I just sat in front of the TV watching various programs and then they broke in and showed the films of the Challenger blowing up over and over again. Still using the same TV to this day, our 1982 Zenith, oh the history I saw on this set. B-) For the 2003 Columbia burning up on re-entry, I remember the day after, I was admitted to the hospital with a left hand that was infected with strep as the result of the cut so I basically just sat in hospital for 5 days from the surgery I had to go through as well as waiting for Infection Control to give me the green light for release, watching the Columbia investigation as it started.

[I'm ALL Right!]

I remember exactly where I was and who told me. My class stopped and the librarian rolled in a television. We sat in horror and watched for the next hour or more.

[Nowhere Man]

The joke sucked, but seven minutes from disaster to humor isn't too bad for a bunch of dorky high school students. Thankfully the jokes got better over the next few days.

I admit I have a very gallows, dark and warped sense of humor, I get it from my father's side of the family. It does help me deal with tragedy although it sometimes ain't too appropriate. My father told me he also saw it live on TV as he took a break at work and he remembers saying right after it happened, "I guess Rockwell does make incinerators." B-P I remember he was an industrial photographer, although he was out of that field at that time, he did go on shoots of the various huge corporations here in Pittsburgh and IIRC, at the time the Space Shuttler was being developed, Rockwell was headquartered here so he did some shoots for them as well as Westinghouse.

[Empireoftheatom48]

I was a Battery commander in Germany sitting in my UHF van and heard the news over the engineering channel

[Nowhere Man]

I'm too young to actually remember it, but I remember learning about them, and the Apollo 1 crew, as I started to get interested in space. What I remember is my mother said something about the schoolteacher, something along the lines of "she shouldn't have even been there".

That stuck in my craw for years. The point of the space industry ought to be to get ordinary people into space, to do their jobs there. It ought to be not that much more of a deal than getting on a jet and going to Europe. I wonder how much damage this did to our space program - no. The space program is the damage itself. Space Ship One should have flown thirty years ago. At this rate I'll be dead before I have a chance to go into space.

I think what got me interesting into space was watching the Apollo 11 moon landing when I was 3 in 1969. I was also into radio electronics which was a great help along with being a bit of a geek. B-) I remember when I was in first grade, my teacher and parents got me books on space travel and I got so into it. I was even bumped up a few times to the 6th grade class when they studied space. Looking back, wish I stuck to it instead of going towards IT but that's in the past. B-) One of my books said that we would "put a man on Mars by the 1980's." I know in the late 1960's, it was planned to land a man on Mars "by 1982 or 1983." Shame we are still spinning our wheels, I do agree with you that "Spaceship One" should have flown in 1974 (or even 1964) instead of 2004. Heck, when you think about it, the groundwork in technology was there in the 1940's and 1950's even. Playing alternate historian, had there been no World War II or had it turned out differently, "Spaceship One" could have been on top of a V-2 and flown by a German pilot. I do find the method of launching Spaceship One from an airplane, I wonder if Dick Rutan watched "The Thunderbirds" back in the 1960's. B-)

I do remember in 1982, around that time, there was a plan for a man to fly into space via private means like Spaceship One did aboard a Conestoga rocket, but I don't know what came of it.

[Rainbow Rising]

I will always remember where I was when I heard about Challenger. I was a senior in high school, and we had midterms that week. On that particular day I didn't have any exams scheduled, so I had the day off. My mother and I made tentative plans to go shopping. It was a damp, overcast day, and we weren't sure if it would rain. I decided to turn on the radio and see if I could get a weather forecast. I turned on WINS, but all they were talking about was Challenger. At first I thought it was a normal news report about the shuttle launch, but when they kept talking about the shuttle for several minutes I began to feel a little nervous. I said to my mother, "Something has happened to the shuttle." We went into the living room and turned on the TV, and there was the footage of the explosion. The sight affected me deeply. I remember crying while writing about it in my diary, trying to make sense of the whole thing.

[BallandPowder]

Powder..Patch..Ball FIRE!

Yes I remember. Almost beat a co-worker the next day who made a crude racist joke about Astronaut McNair.

[KPfromDerryNH]

I was in 10th grade at a trade high school in Massachusetts. I thought it was a joke when Jimmy Stiener told me at lunch. Then I went to Machine Shop related class, there was a tv on, I didn't know it even worked. That's when I knew Jimmy wasn't joking. I was up in Concord this weekend and in an auditorium at the high school where Christa MacAliff taught. I didn't even want to look at her portrait on the wall. All these years later it's still very sad. My three year old is talking about being an astronaunt now and wants to go to the "space museum" planetarium in Concord named for MacAliff. I said ok but it's like going to a cemetary. I'll still encourage her to be an astronaut. Space exploration is the most important thing we can do as a species.