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30 Years Since The Challenger Disaster: Where Were You? (space.com)
Martin S. writes: Thirty years ago today, NASA suffered a spaceflight tragedy that stunned the world and changed the agency forever. When I mentioned this at work most of my colleagues are too young to remember this first hand. When I heard the news, I was in a middle-school science class; our teacher walked us solemnly over to the school library, where we watched the television news. It hit especially hard because one of our other teachers had pursued the slot that was eventually filled by Christa McAuliffe.
In the gym, watching the launch with the rest of the school. I only remember the explosion, hearing gasps and then crying.
I was probably pooping myself at home. I was only seven months old.
5th grade. One of the students from an adjacent classroom ran in and breathlessly announced that the shuttle had blown up. Instant silence. My teacher walked to the other 5th grade classroom to confer with the teacher there, then they opened the partition between the two classrooms and wheeled in the TV-and-VCR-on-a-cart so we could all watch the news together. I just remember feeling like I had been kicked in the gut.
After that class was our morning break period. I immediately went to my next class, which was physics. In the back of the classroom, many of my classmates were huddled around a portable radio, listening to the news. No one said much. (I didn't actually see the video footage of the explosion until I got home that day.)
Yet the gods do not give lightly of the powers they have made,
And with Challenger and seven, once again the price is paid,
Though a nation watched her falling, yet a world could only cry,
As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky!
- From "Fire In The Sky," written by Jordin Kare
Be who you are...and be it in style!
I had been following the space program since I was a kid, so I had read the book that was published after the Apollo 1 fire that also pointed out other problems with NASA safety - in particular the shuttle's SRBs using o-rings and segments instead of a single-piece srb as mandated by the military, because the only way to ship the rings from the pork-barred supplier (martin-thiokol) to nasa was in pieces by barge.
I had stopped by my mother and was watching it on tv when I saw what looked like a small plume of gas coming out the side of one of the srbs, and immediately said "bet you it's a joint failure." A few seconds later, ka-boom.
The whole disaster could have been prevented if the manufacturing plant had been located close enough to the launch facility not to have required the srbs to be shipped in segments. The real disaster has always been political influence on procurement programs.
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Programming, when my manager and another programmer walked by my cube, and told me they were going to what I jokingly referred to as the "accessory meeting room" (the bar next door). They told me Challenger had exploded, I joined them, and we all had drinks as we watched the reruns on the tv over the bar.
*shit*
Fucking "launch it anyway, the President wants to mention it in his State of the Union speech tonight".
mark
I skipped school that day to watch the launch. We had a satellite receiver and I found the NASA wild feeds (the unfiltered video that is sent out without all the talking heads and commentary). It really gave a different take on the disaster than what was on the networks. Much more unfiltered, at least until they killed all transmission.
I personally was about 5 months shy of dropping out, but my father-in-law was best friends with the pilot of the Challenger. They grew up together in Beaufort, NC and both went to the Naval Academy (my father-in-law went into submarines though). He and my mother-in-law were invited to go down to the launch but couldn't because she had just given birth to my wife!
He's still pissed off about it. It was a purely political decision to launch that day. The engineers said they shouldn't and said there was an unnecessary risk due to exact problem that ended up happening. But because it was already delayed several times before, they were pressured to launch against the engineer's recommendations. Because of that people needlessly died.
I'm probably one of the few people in this country that found out about the Challenger explosion with a sigh of relief.
I was a senior in HS, and was taking classes offsite at a local college in the mornings. I had a tape deck in my car, so I rarely listened to news in the morning, and I think that day I'd even decided to skip class, sleep in, and screw around. So I'm minding my own business every morning.
I had to check in to my HS for the afternoon, though. When I walked into school, it was quiet. Like, CREEPY quiet...there were something like 2500 students in my highschool, it was lunchtime, and nearly completely silent. As I came into the commons, I could see that everyone - hundreds of kids and teachers alike - was just shocked, gobsmacked.
This was the 1980s. The era of Red Dawn, Reagan, The Day After, and 50,000 nuclear warheads. I genuinely feared that nuclear war had been announced.
When my g/f told me that the Challenger blew up, I may have even said aloud "Oh? Is that all?"
To this day, what I remember of that moment was my feeling of tremendous relief.
-Styopa
Watching from the beach, after my dad decided we should skip school to go watch.
I have pictures of it from before launch til after the anomoly occurred ... And several pictures of random shots that happened when I stood in shock and awe looking at the sky and not realizing I was still pushing the button until my dad grabbed me and pointed out I was out of film.
I was in 3rd grade.
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I was at home, working on my plumbing, wondering why I received space grade o-rings instead of the cheap ones I ordered.
Watched it live in elementary school, several adult faculty/staff sighed out exclamations in dirty words, which made a lot of the younger kids laugh at hearing this and initially getting scolded for what was perceived as laughter over the tragedy.
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Our teacher applied for the program and was one of what was probably many alternates for the Christa McAuliffe spot.
Everything we did that year revolved around NASA and the space program. I
It hit home when we realized that our teacher could have possibly been on that ship.