40th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle tragedy

[Roscablo]

Second grade. We were actually in music class, but our teacher came and got us, crying, and then we watched the rest of the day. We did art drawings to express our feelings.

 

[Webster]

Senior year of HS. It was a week where Regents tests were being administered so I had off. Was watching The Price is Right and having a bowl of cereal when there was a cut in to the news.

 

[Gym Beam]

Walked into my boss' office and he had it on the TV to watch the launch, etc. When the shuttle exploded, one of the other guys on staff walked by and said, "Guess that's bound to happen sometime when you strap a rocket to your ass."

 

[Deskgrunt50]

Middle school. I was across the hall from a science class that was watching it live. What happened quickly spread through the school.

The 6th grade science teacher had been super excited about it for a long time. Christa McAuliff going to space was such a huge deal.

The feeling the rest of the day was just sort of numb I guess. And it was the first time I really recall seeing some teachers shocked and grief stricken. In a way it was the first time I saw them less as authority figures and just as people.

 

[I Should Coco]

Our eighth-grade science class had the launch on one of those wheel-in-on-a-cart TVs. The main thing I remember is there was the usual amount of B.S. and not paying attention among 13 and 14 year olds. Then the explosion happened. Shock and total silence.

 

[MisterCreosote]

I may be alone on this, but I was in fourth grade and don’t really remember much, if anything, about how I felt. We didn’t get to watch live — my brother, who was a year older, did and he probably remembers it completely differently.

I remember my teacher just going about her normal day afterward. In fact, I didn’t really know anything about it until I got home and my parents explained it to me.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

Middle school. I was across the hall from a science class that was watching it live. What happened quickly spread through the school.

The 6th grade science teacher had been super excited about it for a long time. Christa McAuliff going to space was such a huge deal.

The feeling the rest of the day was just sort of numb I guess. And it was the first time I really recall seeing some teachers shocked and grief stricken. In a way it was the first time I saw them less as authority figures and just as people.

My science teacher told us about it. My next class was music and our teacher was super into the launch and, I believe, might have even applied for the McAuliffe gig. At the least, she wanted to. She was inconsolable and bolted from the room crying. At home that night, my Dad, even today not much of a breaking news event kind of guy, was riveted to the TV. That's when I really knew it was a bad, big deal.

I also remember Reagan delivering a soothing speech that night. It's sad to think about how nothing unites us anymore and how, if this happened today, the MAGA clods and their dear leader would immediately trample all over the collective grieving process by coming up with conspiracy theories and blaming the Demmycrats for killing the astronauts.

 

[BitterYoungMatador2]

I saw a meme on Instagram once that said something to the effect of, "If you want to know why our generation is so jaded, one day our teachers put on the television to watch a shuttle launch and when it exploded instead, no one said a word and simply turned off the TV."

I'm sure we had some discussion in class about it in the days that followed but damn if I remember any.

 

[playthrough]

Middle school, I was either home sick or a snow day, I forget now. But I also remember the cut-in to The Price is Right, and telling my mom when she got home.

And I can still rattle off all the names of the crew, not just McAuliffe.

 

[Neutral Corner]

The pressure was overwhelming from "higher ups," exerted on the engineers and those who wanted to postpone due to the cold temperatures. The latter knew that Challenger's O-rings were a problem. Top brass didn't want a delay or other issues. Had to be a sparkling clean White America Success Story, not to mention all the money spent-involved, and then they went into blame-game CYA mode after the explosion.

It did not help that the launch was on the same day that Reagan was to give his State of the Union address. They didn't want to spoil that reference in the speech. All about image and PR. NASA had had to scrub several times already and didn't want to do it again so they ignored the warnings.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

I was in seventh grade; and for some reason, we already had a half-day of school scheduled to take some sort of standardized test in homeroom. Which was weird in itself as we usually only were there for 10 minutes while attendance was taken and then we were off to our classes.

Took the test, then the homeroom teacher put on some sort of western movie from the 1960s. We only watched part of it before the buses came and got us. Went home, made a peanut butter sandwich and turned on CBS to watch the rest of The Price Is Right. Instead, the news was on with the announcement that the shuttle blew up.

I told my Mom, who was cleaning out her clothes closet, but she was aggravated about something and blew me off. We later just watched the news for the rest of the day.

And I never found out how I did on the standardized test, or what it was about, or why we had to take it.

 

[Neutral Corner]

I was at work at an inside sales office. Someone had brought in a small TV to watch the launch. Saw it in real time. I grew up a space junkie and SF reader. We lived in Tampa when I was young and when conditions were just right we could see the contrail when a rocket went up. I knew as soon as the contrail diverged that they were ****ed.

Add that my godfather was a fighter pilot who flew out of McDill AFB in Tampa, and during early NASA before they worked out high powered cameras he flew missions where he flew an F-105 basically vertical on afterburner following launches up and filming them with his wing cameras.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

It did not help that the launch was on the same day that Reagan was to give his State of the Union address. They didn't want to spoil that reference in the speech. All about image and PR. NASA had had to scrub several times already and didn't want to do it again so they ignored the warnings.

I should have known this but didn't. I guess it's oddly comforting to know we've always been a nation of ****ups.

 

[HanSenSE]

Was getting dressed to go to work. Heard the alert on radio and immediately turned on the TV. Don't think the radio or TV left my side all day.

 

[maumann2]

I had just been hired by WMEL in Melbourne, Fla., to help CBS Radio with Shuttle coverage. After the "Teacher in Space" mission, CBS was going to hand off routine launches to us because of the lack of national interest. It was so cold that morning (and the previous attempt was scrubbed because of a hatch bolt issue) that Don Germaise opted to send me to the county commission meeting in Merritt Island wearing a windbreaker because my winter coat was still in California. The meeting took a break to watch the launch and as soon as I saw the fireball, I was in the car and headed for the south gate of KSC. I spent the rest of the day there, with the contrails hanging in the sky for hours as a testament to the tragic circumstances. At 26, biggest story of my life.

And today is nearly as cold in central Florida as it was in 1986.

 

[qtlaw]

Damn, you folks are YOUNG!! I was in my last year of college, biding time until I started law school in the fall.

The tragedy definitely was shocking, even more so for my generation because we had lived through the landing on the Moon and had come to expect the space program to be flawless. Given the prior Space Shuttle launches, it seemed almost routine in our minds.

BTW, Maumann, my son was sent to Cape Canaveral to work for a year and I cruised through Merritt Island and the Cape a few years back during Christmas holidays. Boy the beaches there are gorgeous and I saw with dolphins in the Atlantic on Christmas!!

 

[maumann2]

Damn, you folks are YOUNG!! I was in my last year of college, biding time until I started law school in the fall.

The tragedy definitely was shocking, even more so for my generation because we had lived through the landing on the Moon and had come to expect the space program to be flawless. Given the prior Space Shuttle launches, it seemed almost routine in our minds.

BTW, Maumann, my son was sent to Cape Canaveral to work for a year and I cruised through Merritt Island and the Cape a few years back during Christmas holidays. Boy the beaches there are gorgeous and I saw with dolphins in the Atlantic on Christmas!!

The Space Coast is an awesome place to live compared to many parts of Florida. Brevard County was forward thinking, buying up large tracts of land on the ocean for parks and limiting the size and number of condos. So it's nowhere near as crowded or commerical as Palm Beach southward or Daytona Beach northward.

Even now, traffic is nothing (and I know most of the neighborhood connecting roads to miss the worst places) compared to Jacksonville, Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Orlando or Tampa/St. Pete. And where else can you see manatees, dolphins, herons, egrets and rays just a few feet from the beach or a boat?

At the same time, the place has always had a boom-bust economy depending on the relative health of the space program, pretty much from the time we moved there in 1960 to now. Even though Dad was tranferred to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston in 1965, Mom always had a special place in her heart for Satellite Beach. So when he took the buyout from IBM in 1987, they moved back there and bought a townhouse less than a mile from the house where Mom and I watched all the Mercury launches.

I got lucky to be in the right place at the right time with the right background. But I was also lucky to get out of there when all the stories dried up in the aftermath of the inquiry, because the station shut down just a few years after I left.

(Then again, I've had a love-hate relationship with Northern California for the better part of 50 years. We've finally agreed that I'm a better tourist than a resident!)

 

[Driftwood]

Three years after Challenger, I was living in Orlando and watched a night shuttle launch from the Cape. Even at that distance, the fireball was about the size of a quarter. It was pretty cool.

 

[FileNotFound]

I was a senior in high school, and had a free period for third hour. I usually spent that time in the journalism room working on the newspaper or yearbook, but on that day I went down to the library to watch the launch, because I knew there was a TV in the library. My friend Shawn and I rolled out the TV on the rolling cart and turned it on in time for the countdown, then the explosion happened and we just stood there, silent.

I broke the silence, quietly. “Shawn, we just watched people die on live TV.” Shawn just nodded.

It was a Tuesday, so I’m sure we played a basketball game that night, and I’m sure I was there, but all I remember about that day was the stark realization that we had witnessed something tragic in real time.

 

[Bubbler]

Freshman in high school. I seem to recall it being an announcement over the P.A. system. I think I was in study hall. Seem to recall someone wheeling a TV in.

That explosion footage, with the flame or whatever it was, traveling up the booster rocket, was shown ad nauseum for the rest of 1986. Much as 9/11 footage was in 2001-02.

And, yes, the jokes were flying in too soon mode, well, too soon.

The space program hasn’t been held in the same regard since. Contrast ‘86 with the optimism that accompanied the Columbia when it launched successfully in ‘81, and before my time, the 60s space race. I think there was the notion that we could conquer any obstacle … until it literally burst before our eyes.