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
• 
I was a junior in high school, and I worked in the A/V department of the library — moving TVs into classrooms, videotaping events, things like that. I walked into the A/V room to grab some equipment for one of my classes. There was nobody else in the room, but one of the TVs was switched on, showing a news program. They were announcing that the Challenger had just exploded.
.
As a lifelong astronomy and space exploration nut, I knew that Christa McAuliffe was on that flight. I’d been following the flight with interest. I was looking forward to hearing about the adventures of “one of us” (i.e. a non-astronaut civilian) in space.
.
I had to spend a couple of minutes regaining my composure before returning to the classroom. The rest of the day is a blank.
At work, pre-Intern et, and no TV, but word got around. The really hard part came later when ladyfriend came home from work. She was devastated. Not so much by the event itself, nor the facr that a teacher was involved (girlfriend was a grade school teacher) but by the reaction of the kids in her class who were going on with “They’ve got to be crazy to go up there.” “Yeah, you wouldn’t catch me doing it.” and so forth. The idea that the next generation could be so cold, uncaring, and have such a lack of a sense of wonder just had her in pieces.
I was a sophomore in college and walked into the dorm where I lived. Two of my hallmates were watching in the first dorm in the hall, and just as I walked in, the shuttle blew up. I asked “Was that the space shuttle? The one with the teacher on it?”
I was in Orlando at the time. My middle school class was at a play of different Poe stories and on the bus ride home we found out what the big cloud of smoke in the sky was. It was a pretty rough time in that area.
I was in my car, driving home from my daily classes. I remember I was in front of a former high school classmate’s house, and her name. I’m pretty sure I would have forgotten her name if it hadn’t happened.
We had just moved to Alexandria, VA, and were enrolling my older brother into 7th grade. I was sitting on a chair in the admin office when someone came in and said that the space shuttle blew up. I remember my first thought was ‘The Space Shuttle doesn’t blow up. That can’t be right.’ Then we went to one of the classrooms and watched the TV of the coverage.
I was actually home sick from school that day, had the place to myself as my mother was out and about with my grandmother. I decided to watch the launch. =\ Minutes after it happened I was still picking my jaw up off the floor as the phone started ringing from friends who saw it too.
Definitely the kind of day you don’t forget.
I was in my seventh-grade English class, where we were just starting a new unit on science fiction (even then, I thought that was a haunting coincidence). My favorite middle school teacher, Mr. Larson, was leading us in a discussion of what the term “science fiction” meant, what elements had to be in such stories to qualify as SF, etc. Another teacher came into the room, and Mr. Larson went over to talk to her. I didn’t think anything of it, as teachers often came into the class to talk with one another about some school policy or news or whatnot. But when he returned, Mr. Larson looked shaken, and shared the news with us. We were all surprised– this sort of thing simply didn’t happen, or at least that’s what we thought when we were 12.
Mr. David, this is off-topic, but I also wanted to say that it was around that same time, in middle school, that I discovered your Spider-Man comics. For an often unhappy adolescent who felt out of place amidst his peers, your comics were a wonderful, funny, exciting escape, and I just wanted to say thank you for that.