Remember Challenger 20 years ago on this day, as President Ronald Reagan put it, the crew of the
space shuttle Challenger "waved goodbye and slipped the surly bounds of earth
to touch the face of God." I still remember where I was on that Tuesday morning. I was nine years old
and laying on the couch at home. It was cold out and I was covered up with a
blanket watching television. I do not recall if school was canceled that day
due to snow, or if I had just stayed home sick. I remember watching television
when the show I was watching was interrupted by breaking news that the space
shuttle had exploded. I shouted to my mom, "Mom come look, the space shuttle blew up". She was
on the phone in the kitchen. At first she didn't believe me. So I called
her again, she came walking into the living room and looked at the TV. She
watched for a minute, still paying more attention to the person on the phone
than watching the TV until they finally re-ran the footage of the explosion
once again. Then she said "oh my, it really did blow up, didn't it?". They would re-play the clip of the 73 second flight of challenger over and
over again, forward and backwards.. fast and slow. Then they would switch to
a shot of the sky where the accident had happened. I strained to see
parachutes coming down. But, of course, there were no parachutes. For the next day or two, we watched them play the same 73 seconds of footage
over and over again. We kept waiting for them to say something new. But it
would be years before the most of what happened that day would finally come
out. A long time passed before NASA would finally admit that it was not the
explosion that killed the astronauts, but the 200 MPH impact with the ocean
that happened after a 65,000 foot descent that lasted 2 minutes and 45 seconds.
Some controversial evidence indicates that the astronauts were conscious and
making efforts to save themselves during that time. It would take at least a day before any regular television resumed playing.
In the mean-time, we all gained a thorough lesson about the crew and their
mission. Of course, I knew there were space shuttles, I even knew we had been
to the moon (I had seen Superman 2, after all). But in that day, I became
just a bit more aware that going to space wasn't something ordinary. The
astronauts were not business people heading off to work, they were heros.
posted at: 22:32 | permanent link to this entry | Comments: