01/28/1986

In Memoriam of the Challenger 7 ...


Challenger crew (l-r): Ellison Onizuka, Michael Smith, Christa McAuliffe, Dick Scobee, Gregory Jarvis, Ronald McNair, and Judith Resnik

 

An awful, awful day. Will never forget my science teacher walking in to tell us and me saying "C'mon you're making that up." He said "I'd never make that up."

RIP.

 

Same deal....we were at lunch and our science teacher broke the news.

RIP.

 

I was coming back to the dorm from a class when a guy who lived down the hall stops me and tells me what happened. I didn't believe him. I walked about a half-block when I thought, "Now why would he make something like that up?"

 

I walked into the Student Union building a few minutes after it happened and a bunch of people were huddled around the TV. The image that I will always remember is the shot of Christa McAuliffe's mother on the viewing stand as Challenger exploded. She had a look on her face that said she had no idea what she had just seen and that she didn't comprehend what had just happened to her daughter.

 

I was in second grade. My old-as-bones teacher put on the radio for us. We didn't really understand the magnitude of what was going on.

 

I was in fifth grade, waiting to go to lunch, and the teacher walked in to tell us. She was also my science teacher, oddly enough. We delayed lunch school-wide to watch coverage.

 

I was also walking into the dorm. My room was right above the front door -- my roommate looked out and yelled "Get your ass up here! The space shuttle just crashed!"

 

I was in my first month of my first full-time job, living at home with my parents until an apartment opened up, commuting 55 miles each way (after sending out last page at 1 a.m.)

So, when I rolled out of bed every day at noon, I was not exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I joined my mom and dad at the family room table for coffee (dad worked midnight shift at HIS paper, and he rarely got up much before 10-11 himself).

We were watching CNN, which was showing the launch live. Since I had been a major space maven in the 1960s, through Apollo, I was still the closest thing we had to an "expert commentator."

The shuttle lifted off. Nothing appeared unusual at the moment (although if you watch the tapes now, you can see signs of why what happened happened), and it continued to climb throught the "go at throttle-up" command.

When the fireball erupted on screen, I just blurted out, "HOLY SHIT!!"

My parents had heard me swear plenty before, but rarely over morning coffee. My mother said, "What's wrong? What happened?"

"They're dead," I said. The guy CNN had commentating on the liftoff was babbling stuff about "maybe they can glide to a landing," "I think I see a parachute," yadda yadda, but I knew how the shuttle was (and still is) designed.

If anything goes wrong before those SRB's jettison, you're done. There is no escape system.

"You better call your M.E.," I told my dad. He was wire editor at his paper. "You're gonna have a big night ahead of you." He was already on the phone. He ended up working about a 14-hour shift that night.

As did I. My dinky daily pulled me off my sports-editor duties to help put together a couple of pages on the shuttle.

 

I feel like I post this every year, but Jan. 28 is my birthday. I was in school. Everybody watching on TV. They sent us home before I got the traditional birthday cupcake at lunch.

 

Mr. Starman Justice, swear? Never.

 

I was a senior in high school. Bell for the end of first period had just gone off and as we were getting up from our desks, the principal came over the loudspeaker and gave us the news. A TV tuned into the coverage was waiting for me in second period. Our school was right near an Air Force base, so the tragedy had some extra impact on a lot of the people in the area.

BTW, I always found it kind of an oddity that three of the worst space exploration accidents -- The Apollo fire that killed Gus Grissom, among others (Jan. 27), and the Challenger (Jan. 28) and Columbia (Feb. 1) disasters -- all occured within a week of each other, datewise.