Me, I was walking into the office of my boss in the Marvel direct sales office, moving with the speed and grace of a zombie. Carol looked up at me and saw that I was ashen. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“The Challenger blew up,” I said. My then-wife had been watching the launch on television and had called me, sobbing, telling me the news. We didn’t know at the time that it hadn’t actually blown up so much as it had been shaken apart.
Word sped quickly through the Marvel offices and I had plenty of zombie friends for the rest of that day. The shuttle had been very much in the news, mostly because of the presence of teacher Christa McAuliffe. Years later, Bill Mumy (who had at least some experience with space travel, albeit fictional) and I would memorialize her in our small way by naming the good ship Christa after her in the TV series Space Cases.
To anyone old enough to remember it, it’s just one of those snapshot moments in your head, where you recall exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard.
PAD
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I was still working at Krause Publications, both for “Comics Buyer’s Guide” and “Goldmine,” which was for record collectors. I watched everything I could on the news that day, including CNN (the only game in cable news at the time). When it came time to watch the broadcast networks specials on the story at 9 pm that night, I was too tired, literally emotionally exhausted.
I had already been diagnosed as a chronic depressive, and Challenger sent me into a spiral I didnt really recover from for the rest of that year. It ended with me losing my job.
I remember watching it on TV. I was only four at the time, so I don’t remember if it was a news broadcast later in the day, or if it was the actual broadcast. I knew there was a teacher on it, and my best friend’s mother was a teacher, and somehow in our minds, the two of us decided we couldn’t let her out of our sight for quite awhile. (It seemed like years, but it was probably only a couple weeks. Time moves differently when you’re four.)
I was in the library at my middle school. They had a monitor set up so we could watch the launch.
I was in high school watching it on television. I was so excited about the space launch. I couldn’t believe what I was watching when it blew up.
The teacher instantly turned off the tv once she realized what was happening. I’m not sure the school had any policies about allowing students to watch a disaster unfold on TV.
The school day went on, but most teachers gave up on trying to teach us for the day.
My stomach had been giving me trouble so I excused myself and left school early that day. I was still well enough to walk all the way home. I got home and Kathy was in front of the television. CNN was on.
“The Challenger exploded!” she told me. The details were still being discerned, but we were at the point where a shuttle launch was no longer newsworthy enough for most stations and CNN was the only one bothering to show it live.
I don’t think the space program ever really recovered from that. All the whiz-bang dreams of the pulp novelists started to look a bit naive compared to the brutal reality.
I was in my elementary school’s P.E. class. A couple of older students came walking through the gym and announced that it had blown up and got yelled at by the P.E. coach for making up such a horrible story . . .
Wow. Talk about shooting the messenger.
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PAD
I was sitting in my 3rd grade class. Another teacher came in and whispered something to our teacher. Upon hearing the news, our teacher looked completely stunned. She ran and got a TV, and showed us the news coverage explaining the importance of what had just happened. Aside from finding out about the intense math involved, the Challenger was the other event that made me give up (granted, I was eight)on becoming an astronaut.
I think I was in 4th grade, and had maybe just gotten in trouble for pantsing a kid. The two moments may be separate, but have somehow been jumbled together by my memory.
I was at my grandmother’s house. I was 9. I’m not sure why we weren’t in school that day. It was either an in-service day or a snow day. My brother and I were watching it on the TV in her bedroom. The shuttle exploded, and my brother and I ran downstairs and said, “Grandma, Grandma, the space shuttle blew up!” Thinking we were talking about the launch itself, she said, “The space shuttle always blows up!” Later, on the news, she found out what had really happened.
I was working at my first (and only) job with potential, in my first cube ( not the last) when I heard it on the radio. It was a bright sunny day, but the shock in our area was just weird. Somehow the world stopped moving forward that day.
I was in my 11th Grade Spanish class. The teacher announced it at the start of class, and I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. This launch had meant so much to me, because it was the first time a civilian was going into space, which made me hope that I would someday make it even if I didn’t pass algebra. A few minutes into the lesson the teacher stopped class and asked me “Are you all right?”
I was a high school junior in Medina, Ohio taking German III language class when several classes were brought into the school’s libary following a brief announcement over the P.A. system. Someone wheeled out a cart with a television and we were bombarded with news footage showing the explosion (which later turned out to be rapid disintegration creating a cloud of vapor and gases) over and over.
I had little to no interest in the space program until that moment and have followed the various shuttle missions ever since.
I was 7 years old, watching the launch with my second grade class in the school library. Like some others here, my school was taking full advantage of all of the educational materials and programming that NASA provided to accompany Christa McAuliffe’s flight. I mostly remember the abruptness of moment; lots of excitement that had been building up over the previous weeks suddenly coming to a halt. I really don’t remember anything after the event. I know our teachers must have discussed it with us, but despite how well I remember small details of the event right up to the launch, I’ve got nothing afterward.
I was living at my parents’ home at that time. So there I was, watching some TV (reruns of Bewitched and Flipper, if I remember well), when a special newscast broke the news. I let out a “Oh My God!” which shook my mother, who was speaking on the phone at that moment. I really was a sad day.
I was rather young, so I didn’t hear about it until a few years after the fact.
I had the day off from junior high, and my mother and I were planning a fun day out. I set the VCR to record the shuttle launch (I’d always watched them live when I could) and we headed out. We stopped at this comic book / hobby shop first, where I bought a model ENTERPRISE and some books, and headed off to our favorite Chinese restaurant for lunch.
We heard the news on the car radio on the way there. I remember feeling numb, nauseas, beyond shocked. Lunch was abandoned. We went home, and I spent the rest of the day glued to the TV, in tears. I can’t believe it’s really been 25 years already.
First day of the second semester of 9th grade. It was lunchtime, and I was just going to the computer room where my next class was going to be, when one teacher told another that they lost the shuttle. At first I couldn’t understand how they can “loose” the shuttle, but then I realized what he was talking about. Due to a scheduling mixup, I didn’t actually have a class in the computer room, so I speant the next hour in the library where a tv had been set up. To make the day even more tragically memorable, that evening, my grandfather died after a long illness.
I was at university, surrounded by shallow áššhølëš who were angry that such a “trivial event” was being deemed newsworthy for “sensational” reasons.
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That still makes me angry.
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I wish Jeanne Robinson’s reply to interviewers after the event was better reported. When asked if this had given her second thoughts about being part of the same program as Christa McAuliffe, she made it clear she’d be on the next shuttle if given the chance.
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I regret that I can’t remember the name of the author, but his short story can be found in an Asimov collection. In it, an astronaut dies alone in space, inspiring a greater push for space exploration so that his death (which may have been a hoax) will not be in vain.
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Instead, we’re kept earthbound by fear. Sometimes, it’s not even our own fear. I don’t know whether to snarl or weep right now.
You might be thinking of The Cave Of Night, by James Gunn. It was reprinted in a collection called Where Do We Go From Here, which Asimov edited.
That’s the one, thank you.
I was a senior in high school. It was exam week. I had an English exam in the morning and nothing in the afternoon. I don’t remember how I did on the exam, but I finished it and was done for the day, getting home around 11:30 or so.
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My kid brother was home “sick” and was sitting on the couch watching television. I headed into the kitchen to start making some lunch.
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A few minutes later, he yelled to me from the other room, “Tim, get in here. I think you’re going to want to see this.”
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“Helluva day” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
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Next time we had class (i.e. when the second semester started), my physics teacher broke from the curriculum and we spent most of the day talking about what it all might mean for the future of the space program. Seventeen years later, I got to pay that forward when we lost Columbia. (Not a debt I particularly *wanted* to pay forward, mind you.)
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I gave a talk to the student body this past Tuesday about the anniversary of Challenger and the importance of not letting yourself be fooled (to paraphrase Feynman). Students were definitely listening; I just hope they heard.
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And to this day, I can’t hear “go at throttle up” without catching my breath.
I was between classes in my freshman year of college. Someone came up to me and told me that Columbia had exploded. I thought it was a joke, since I knew that it was Challenger launching that day. But there was a part of me that was not so sure. And I ran up to where I knew I could find a TV. And watched it happen again on tape. I spent the rest of the day attached to my Walkman as much as possible while I was in the process of moving to a new dorm room. I must have had class that day but cannot remember it.
In some ways it seems so small now, after 9/11 and the tsunami and Katrina. Just seven people. Not an act of war. Not a disaster. Just a tragedy. That was surely how it felt when Columbia went down. But at the same time, it changed everything for the space program. I don’t think it’s ever recovered.
I have a vague recollection of being at work, and a co-worker hearing the news on the radio and giving us infrequent updates (no TV).
I had a good friend who I always called to wish a Happy Birthday, and I had missed it so I was calling belatedly. I asked her what she’d done to celebrate her birthday. “Listened to reports about the Challenger”, was the reply. It was then that I actually connected a date to the event.
Some time after that, I saw John Denver in concert, and he dedicated a song to the crew of the Challenger, and he mentioned that that was supposed to be “his” flight. Which reminded us that he had actively pursued the position as a civilian member of the flight crew.
I was walking between classes through the high school library. A particular student known for antics came running through shouting the shuttle had just blown up. Most people thought he was making a very crude joke. It wasn’t until 5 minutes later upon my arrival to class that it was realized it was all too real.
Another snapshot moment was when I woke up the morning of Colombia’s destruction with a really bad feeling. I turned on the TV to catch footage of the trailing debris in the sky captured by someone’s camcorder.
I was a day old infant, and my mother was watching from the hospital, really depressed for Judith Resnick. I think another baby was named for her in a nearby room.
I was in college, and coming back to my dorm after classes. I’m sure I wrote something down at the time, but looking back, I can only assume I felt a bit numb that day. I probably turned on my TV to find out what was going on, and later watched the president address the nation; but I don’t specifically remember those events.
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I’m sure I would have remembered if I’d encountered any “shallow áššhølëš” like Bob Macfie did. People like that tend to stick in your memory, unfortunately. I probably remember where I was when I learned John Lennon had been shot (the school library) because an older kid had said something like, “Lennon’s dead.” I remember thinking he was a wise-ášš talking about Lenin; and that he knew we’d have been studying about the Russian revolution and the years afterward around that time.
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And speaking of Bob Macfie, he said, “I regret that I can’t remember the name of the author, but his short story can be found in an Asimov collection. In it, an astronaut dies alone in space, inspiring a greater push for space exploration so that his death (which may have been a hoax) will not be in vain.”
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That, in turn, reminds me of the novella Abandon in Place by Jerry Oltion. It appeared in the Dec. 1996 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was also expanded into a novel, but I’m not familiar with that version.
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I never saw Space Cases, though I was aware of it via PAD’s CBG column. I knew the ship was called the Christa, but I don’t think I ever knew it was named for Christa McAuliffe.
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Rick
I remember at the time I was living in Germany. I was in the second grade, my brother was an infant being a pain in the ášš when the news broke. The video of the Challenger going in flames became forever locked in my mind. As a kid I was terrified of space and the sciences for several years, but since then I became a Physicist.
I can still remember a lot about that day… sitting in shock in the VTC edit bay, running around campus grabbing interviews with students, mostly filming people just staring at TV screens in the University Center… wish I knew what had become of those tapes…
I was visiting the high school where I graduated from & worked (actual paid job) at in the AV dept. We were taping it for future viewing in the science classes and commenting @ how it took @ 2 mins to reach space & that the shuttle always rolled 3 times (or something to that effect). After it happened & the shock wore off, I had the supervisor call the office so that they could make an announcement. I don’t think they ever used that tape.
I was in Band Class when the announcement came over the PA system. The principal announced in and said a prayer. (I went to a private Christian school. There were no separation of church and state issues involved — prayer in school was a given). After a short break, we went right back to practicing — either for a pep rally or for sectionals, I can’t really remember.
I was in band class, too (although not at a private school). Someone came in and announced it to the class; at first, none of us really believed it, but as we walked to our next class, we could see it being replayed endlessly on a TV that someone had set up in the library (at the junior high I went to, the classrooms were situated around a central, open library). We all just stopped and stared as the space shuttle exploded over and over again. I believe one of our teachers had been a finalist for the spot that ultimately went to Christa McAuliffe.
I had just left a class and was walking across campus, when I overheard someone talking about it. I didn’t hear much, though, so I wasn’t sure anything really had happened until I got to the Student Union and saw it on the TV.
I was thirteen. That day when my eighth grade class broke for lunch, a went to the corner store a block away from my school where I typically went. The store owner had the small TV in his store on. He and another student, I think a year older than me, were watching it. They said the shuttle blew up. I didn’t comprehend. “You mean, what, it caught on fire, or something? Some part fell off of it?” “No, it blew up,” he said. I thought this was an exaggeration or something, because I genuinely could not wrap my mind around the idea that something like our space shuttle could be destroyed–as in completed destructed. It took a bit for what they were saying to sink in.
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The same thing happened 15 years later on 9/11. When I heard about a plane hitting the towers, I figured it was some flyboy on a joyride in a single engine plane, or something, and when I heard about the tower or towers “collapsing”, I thought they meant like a part of the facade at street level, or something. The idea of the entire skyscrapers just banana-peeling outward and imploding downward, I just couldn’t get it. I remember walking down to Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken to take pictures of the skyline, and wondering if I could see glimpses of the towers through those huge columns of smoke, but wondering why I couldn’t see them.
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That’s what it is during times like this. The event is so horrific that it’s hard to wrap your mind around it and comprehend.
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I loved science when I was a kid, and astronomy in particular. Still do. So this was definitely a rude awakening.
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Two years later, when I was a sophomore in high school, we had to do a book report one month on a non-fiction book. I chose Challengers, which offered a biography on each of the seven astronauts. I remember being fascinated by some of their stories. The one that sticks with me was that of Ronald E. McNair. In addition to being a PhD in physics from MIT, he could play the saxophone and was such an accomplished karate black belt that he could break cinder blocks with his head. It was learning things like that that humanized them for me, made them something more than just names and faces.
i hadn’t been born yet, but my mom told me that she was in her science class watching it live on TV, along with every other classroom in the school that had a TV. she says that when it happened, you could hear a collective gasp from the entire school, followed by about 1-2 minutes of stunned silence.
i remember it vividly, i was in kindergarten we watched the pre launch, when i got to my babysitter’s i was informed a=of what happened.
I was in high school. One of the teachers wheeled in a television, warned us all not to laugh (which was fair: If you tell a bunch of high school students the space shuttle carrying the first teacher into space exploded, it sounds like a bad joke), and played the news for us. It was truly horrible. I think we were all stunned.
Well, the school announced it over the PA after Phys Ed, so I was probably outside when it happened. We could still see the smoke when we got back outside.
Yes, I was living in central Florida at the time.
I was stationed at Edwards AFB, Ca when the event happened.
I remember the base going to full alert, DEFCON 4, here comes the nukes, oh crap…then we were told the Challenger had exploded on take-off. Challenger? You’re kidding, right?
Nope, blew up on take-off. The Rumors flew as the day progressed. Everything from sabotage to mechanical failure to alien invaders was discussed.
I spent 12 hours armed to the teeth on a gate out in the middle of no-where wondering WTF. No tv, radio nor smoke signals to relay the ongoing information stream of the disaster. All I had was a hand held communication radio with 4 channels, some water, a box nasty and a battery slowly going dead.
I did not get the full story until I was relieved later that night.
The Challenger was the first shuttle I saw land at Edwards and the first one I witnessed getting a piggy-back ride back to the Cape.
I was a freshman and Texas A&M, still living with my parents thanks to the convenience of a major university not five miles from home. I had had no classes that morning and had slept in. I had been up late the night before doing something. My grades that semester would indicate that it wasn’t studying.
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My sister burst into my room, obviously distraught, and told me the news. I looked at her at her, made some sort of grunt, turned over and went back to sleep. It didn’t really register until I woke up later with a bad feeling that something was wrong. Then I remembered…
I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t care about the disaster. I just wasn’t awake enough to realize what had happened at first.
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Second, writing about this has reminded me of something that I found personally horrifying about the whole affair. One of my favorite teachers was my high school physics teacher. She had the distinction when she was in high school of being one of several students who had an experiment she suggested actually being enacted on Skylab. The name was Cytoplasmic Streaming in Zero Gravity and, as the title indicates, had to do with how cells function in zero G. Most of our class had tried to encourage her to try to be the Teacher in Space. We thought she’d have a great chance with that type of backstory and she was a great teacher. Fortunately, she didn’t want have anything to do with being personally shot up into space.
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Later on the day of the Challenger disaster, I remember telling her that she should try to be where Christa McAuliffe ended up sitting and feeling sick.
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In class in jr. high watching the TV.
To this day, I don’t understand how I was left in this position, but I was sitting alone in class. I had forgotten my permission slip for our monthly trip to the old folk’s home, so I was left to sit in my core class (this was junior high) for three hours when, barely half an hour into it, the principal came over the loudspeaker and made the announcement. So, for two and a half hours, I sat alone, with no one to talk to, and thought about those astronauts, the teacher, and their families.
I was in high school in computer class when one of the other teachers came in & whispered the news to our teacher. He turned on the tv & we watched what was going on. As we were one of the few classes w/ tv sets, a lot of staff & other students slowly came in to watch in shock & horror. Class bells rang & no-one moved for hours.
For some reason, I turned on the TV while getting ready for work, something I didn’t normally do. Was surprised to see the shuttle was about to launch; I think it’d originally been scheduled for earlier but there was a hold. So I figured I’d take a few minutes to watch it, and thus saw the explosion.
After making a few phone calls, I went on into work, which was at a computer research institute. Pretty much all of the morning was spent in the main conference room with most others, watching the coverage and talking about it.
I happened to visit Johnson Space Center last month, and, courtesy of Michael Grabois who works there, got the good tour. In the shuttle training center building, 1.5 particularly long corridors (imagine a T shape where the top line is 2-3x the length of the base line) have a line of crew photos for every shuttle mission. As it happened, and I believe Michael said it was coincidence, the photos for Challenger’s and Columbia’s last missions face each other.
[As long as I’m writing about the visit and space, I’ll also mention this. As a kid in the 60s, I was a major space geek; in fact, my second grade report card has a mention by the teacher that I’d been teaching the class about space (I had the general astronomy book Stars by Herbert Zim pretty much memorized). The highlight of the JSC visit was getting to go into the Gemini/Apollo era mission control room, which has been preserved. I’ve now got photographic proof that I got to sit at the Flight Director desk, something that would’ve given my kid self a geekgasm beyond imagining.]
I was still in high school. I live in Central Florida, but I can’t count myself among those who saw the explosion in the sky, and I think I’m grateful for that. I got the news from word of mouth. I can no longer remember which class, and it may be that my memories are muddled by the fact that so many of my fellow students were making jokes about it mere moments after the news came, which saddened me greatly.
5th grade, Mr. Johnson’s class, Mason Elementary School in San Diego. We were supposed to watch the launch live, but for some reason, we didn’t catch it. One of Mr. Johnson’s coworkers rushed into our classroom and whispered something into his ear. He then told us that there had been an accident with the Challenger, and once the class TV had been wheeled in, we watched the footage of the explosion.
Two years later, we became the first 7th grade class to attend the newly opened Challenger Junior High School.
I think these closing remarks from then-President Reagan on that day are most appropriate:
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. Thank you.”
Freshman year in college. Eating breakfast in the dorm cafeteria. One by one, as word quickly spread from table to table, all of the students found their way to the TV room down the hall.
I was in fifth grade… in Concord, NH. Y’know, home of Christa McAuliffe. She’d come around to all the schools in Concord (and probably all the high schools, at least, in the state), but I’d actually personally met her at a friend’s home – she was a family friend of theirs, and I happened to be over visiting him when she showed up.
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I’m pretty sure there was a law that put all school kids in front of a TV to watch. There weren’t enough TVs in school, so classes doubled up… and there STILL weren’t enough TVs in school, so some teachers (and I believe some parents) brought in their own for the day.
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You could feel the excitement in the air. I was about the smallest kid in the school, which more or less guaranteed me a front row seat even if I hadn’t been willing to push and shove my way into position (which I was – I was a long-time space-nut. Most of my friends ascribed it to homesickness…)
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Liftoff… everyone cheered. 73 seconds later… everyone cheered again, thinking it was SRB separation. I think only myself and my homeroom teacher (who’d had actually been one of the finalists, or semifinalists, or something… he’d gotten fairly along in the selection process himself) realized it was too early for that. I can still remember the absolute disconnect between the sinking feeling in my gut and 40-50 kids cheering around me.
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They had quieted down and realized something was wrong by the time they said “Obviously a major malfunction.” I was just too stunned to respond. I honestly don’t remember the rest of that day at all; I’m not. I know there wasn’t any actual schooling done – I suspect that those of us who *could* go home probably did.
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First punch I ever threw was later that week, when somebody made a joke about McAuliffe’s last words; I’m not sure if I connected or not, but I do know I didn’t get in any trouble for it.
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A couple of years ago, I was looking for music by Michael Longcor (a filker) on YouTube and I came across his song about the disaster, and it brought me to absolute tears.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUAb6BOhZh4
Gah. That was supposed to be “I’m not certain the rest of the day even registered at the time.”
I was in the fourth grade, in class. We had gotten back from lunch and my teacher, Mrs.Highlander, told us what had happened. I honestly don’t remember anything else about that day; we had all read quite a bit about Ms.McAullife and the “teacher in space” program, and had been following her progress in Scholastic publications and whatnot. Our music teacher wrote a song about her, called “May Your Future Be Limited Only By Your Dreams,” the title being a quote from a speech by Ms.McAullife, which we all sang at an assembly later on. When I was in High School, I learned that my chemistry teacher, Mr.Clear, had been one of the other teachers considered for her spot on The Challenger. I thought Ronald Reagan’s speech about the astronauts was particularly poignant, and I still get a bit teary whenever I read John Magee’s “High Flight,” which his speech quotes.
On a related note, in 1967 My father was in the Air Force, stationed at Cocoa Beach in Florida, working as a dental technician when the Apollo I module caught fire and burned, killing Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and Gus Grissom; he had cleaned their teeth as part of their pre-flight physical exam regimen.
Terrible, terrible stuff.
I instantly recognized the Christa McAuliffe tribute on Space Cases when the show premiered. As for where I was at the time of the Challenger disaster, I was in the hospital and only an hour old.
I had stayed home “sick” as a ten year old, in Maryland. Watching the flight go up, my mom heard me screaming from the living room, and came crashing in wondering what was going on.
High school, senior year, watching it on TV in class.
Pure disbelief and no one said a word for a long time.
I was in 10th Grade Chemistry class.We were heading into the Lab that day when the physics teacher walked in and said” The Challenger just exploded”.I dont remember a lot but I think we actually turned on the radio in the clasroom and kids had their walkman radios all tuned in and were giving us updates as far as what happened.
I was in 2nd grade, my teacher was late, he came in and talked about the shuttle and about Christa McAuliffe, being the first teacher in space, (as a sort of recap, in case we hadn’t heard about the Challenger mission.) Then after the setup sets in with a pause that I can only describe as “11 months pregnant” (or so it seemed)
He said simply, “They died.”
All of us kids were stunned, and then he went over to the TV we had in the back of the room, and said something, I can’t remember, but we watched it for most of the day.