I was sitting at my desk at Marvel comics. In those days I was Marvel’s direct sales manager. My phone rang and I answered it.
It was Myra, my then-wife. She was audibly sobbing. Naturally I thought something had happened to Shana. “What’s wrong?”
“The Challenger blew up,” she said, her voice choking. She’d been watching it on TV and had actually seen it blown out of the sky.
I was stunned. So much had been made about the Challenger, including Christa McAuliffe as the first civilian to take part in the space program. And now they were gone? Just like that? I could barely believe it.
Some years later Bill Mumy and I made our own small tribute to her by naming our spaceship “The Christa” in our TV series SPACE CASES. I’ve no idea whether her family was ever aware of it, but I’d like to think they would have appreciated the shout out.
PAD
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I was in junior high school at the time it happened. If I remember correctly, it occured while we were in the cafeteria over lunch. After lunch, our history teacher set up a TV and played a video tape of the launch. At the time, it wasn’t unusual for schools to show shuttle launches as they were still relatively new and I figured the fact that Christa was a teacher was additional reason to show it in class.
And as the Challenger was rocketing up through the atmostphere, wouldn’t you know that I was the idiot who said out loud in class, “wouldn’t it be funny if it blew up” exactly three second before it did so.
To this day, my toenails curl when I remember how I felt in that moment . . .
I was a freshman in college, still living at home as Texas A&M is three miles from the house I grew up in. I had no class at that time and was asleep. My sister burst into the room, terribly upset, shouting that the shuttle had grown up. I was so zonked out that I said something abrupt and just lay down and went back to sleep.
I felt pretty bad about that later when I actually realized what had happened. Thanks to commenter Ed for sharing his memory. I just want to say that you were a middle schooler and that’s the type of thought that goes through lots of people’s heads. Kids in junior high just haven’t properly installed filtering software into their brains that consistently stops that stuff. Some people never do.
Final sidenote. My high school physics teacher, when she was herself a high school student, had participated in a program for students to submit experiment ideas to be run on Skylab and hers was on of the ones that was chosen. It was Cytoplasmic Streaming in Zero Gravity. I remember my whole classroom telling her that she should apply to be the teacher the Reagan sent into space. We thought that type of backstory would play well. I’m glad she didn’t take our advice.
Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia
I really hate this week of the year.
I was in elementary school, outside, so it must have been during recess, when a classmate said something like, “Did you hear what happened? The space shuttle blew up!” I don’t remember how he found out, or when I first watched the video, but I remember that moment.
Strangely, I can’t remember how I *found out* about Columbia, even though I blogged about my reaction to the news.
That’s exactly how I found out, too: elementary school, kid at recess. Although in my case, it wasn’t a classmate, just some random kid who walked by me. I didn’t even know him.
I was a senior in HS, and I’d just come home from a midterm. I was making lunch, and my brother called me in to see what was on the news. My heart sank as soon as I realized what I was seeing.
My HS physics teacher totally broke from the syllabus the next day to spend the entire period in a group discussion about Challenger, what it meant, and where we should go from here. 17 years later (almost to the frickin’ day), I wound up doing the same thing for my classes after Columbia. (I hate this week, too.)
Part of my students’ homework tonight is to talk to their parents about Challenger, Columbia, and/or Apollo 1, and see what memories can be shared.
And PAD — I don’t know if Christa McAuliffe’s family ever appreciated the Space Cases reference, but I know quite a few fans did…
I was at the beginning of my third (and, as it turned out, final) year as Staff Editor for “Comics Buyer’s Guide” and “Goldmine.” I was filing photographs for the latter (a newspaper for record collectors) when one of the women who worked in production came in to tell us that the space shuttle had exploded. I wandered to where my desk was near Don and Maggie Thompson’s, and Don was talking about it. As it turned out, Steven, the youngest of the Thompsons, had been home from school and saw the first broadcasts. He called his dad to tell him the news. I think it spread throughout the company soon after. The new was broadcast from radio over the Krause PA system.
I got home for lunch and called my friend Rosie. The first words out of her mouth were “Did you see it?” I turned on CNN and, not long after, the tape played. IT was the entire tape, showing the shuttle sluggishly lifting off, the soaring heavenward, and then the awful explosion of the main tank and the two booster rockets going off by themselves, leaving the trail behind them like some hideous insect antennae. Then the camera went back to capture the expressions of the McAullife family, the people slowly leaving the stands, one woman talking to someone, the woman yelling “It’s just not there!”
That night, when I got home from work, I watched the coverage on CNN for two hours. I was going to watch the CBS News special at 9 oclock Central, but I suddenly realized how tired I was. I think it was one of the times I can look back and realized I was emotionally exhausted.
The next day, I got to work early and wrote much of the editorial that would run the following issue. Don and Maggie would add their own thoughts, as well as doing some edits on what I’d written. I especially remember mentioning Norman Mailer’s book about the first moon landing, “Fire on the Moon,” reminding people that traveling into space required riding atop a pillar of fire, something we’d come to take for granted. When the column was published, it was one of the few editorial to run with all three of our names as the writers.
I don’t remember if I put this in the column, but it popped into my head that the news about Challenger may have hit people of that time the way the news about the Titanic hit people in its day. Not in terms of the death toll, of course, Titanic was much greater in that respect. But both ships represented technology, a technology that the people of the time were proud of — but also complacent about. And then that complacency was shattered in the most horrific way imaginable. And I think everyone watching every shuttle launch following Challenger, for a split second, relived that awful moment.
I was in eighth grade when Challenger blew up. I went to the corner store during lunch period,. The store owner and another student were watching the TV and said the shuttle exploded. I didn’t understand. “What, do you mean it caught fire or something?” “No, it EXPLODED.” I just couldn’t wrap my head around the notion that something we made disintegrated.
(I reacted to the collapse of the WTC Towers the same way.)
It was the same with me when I heard someone say that they lost the shuttle. My first thought was in the nature of “how to do you lose a shuttle, it’s kind of big” before understanding what happened.
I was standing in line in the Unemployment Office, actually.
The next day (i think it was), i was at the Book Nook and someone came in with a big box of old copies of ANALOG he wanted to sell. Alex or Dave told him they couldn’t give him anything for them, and he said “Can I just leave them by the door so that anyone who wants them can pick them up?”
I said i’d take the whole box, he said fine, and i did.
When i got home, the first one i picked up and opened had John Campbell’s editorial on the Apollo One fire.
I still remember a line from it something on the close order of “Most people forget that real exploration often consists in large part of finding new ways to die unexpectedly.”
I was working that day, and headed down to the ground floor of the office building to grab a snack from the small shop there. Leaving, I noticed a whole bunch of people clustered around a ceiling-mounted TV in the lobby — watching what had happened
I (barely) remembered the Apollo 1 from my own childhood, but this drove home to me both the risks, and the need to move past them when they turned up craps.
i was in kindergarten in hudson mass, we were loading the buses, but they had the tvs on the giant carts out so we could watch it go up. i remember seeing it go up, but that is it, i missed the explosion. when i got to my babysitter’s, her mom was crying and had to explain to me in broken english what happened.
a couple years later i moved to a town on the border of new hampshire and every teacher who knew her, talked about it on the anniversaries
I’m not sure I ever knew that the Christa on Space Cases was named after her… that’s pretty cool.
I was in fifth grade. The shuttle launch was a huge deal around town because said town is Concord, NH – home of Christa McCauliffe. My teacher, Mr. P., had applied himself, and the story going around was he had been one of the finalists. No idea if that was true or not (in retrospect, what are the odds that TWO teachers from the same city that barely qualifies as a city being finalists? But I digress…) but that was the story going around.
There had been talk about whether or not they should just cancel school for the day (I only found out about this years later) but it was eventually decided not to; they’d just have everybody watch it live. There weren’t, of course, nearly enough TVs for every class, but our school was set up in quads – basically four classroom-sized cubicles in each giant room, with “walls” even a small-for-his-age 10-yo could see over (on tip-toe, at least). So each quad got a TV, they’d clear all the desks out of one room and set up enough chairs for everybody – about 100 kids in all.
There was a lot of excitement, naturally. And I was already space-mad. My sharpest memory of the event, though, was the loud cheers when it exploded – most of the kids thought it was the SRB separation. I just remember sitting there in stunned silence thinking “It’s too early for that” while the cheers echoed. And then somebody on TV said “There appears to be a problem.” (I think it was a local reporter covering the launch, I’m not sure. It’s not on the official video, but I remember it clear as anything.) Kids started to quiet down, and then the official voice announced that it had exploded.
We were absolutely stunned. The city practically shut down as parents left work to race over to take their kids out of school.
God. 29 years later, and I’m nearly in tears thinking about it.
Now, do you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot?
I was in Fifth Grade, being kept after school for not finishing my arithmetic when a classmate burst in to tell us that Kennedy had been shot. This was about 3:45 when I would be sent home because it was when the teachers could leave. I went home, thinking I’d tell my parents when they got home from work, and my siblings who were in high school. They were all there already. It turned out my school decided not to tell the students about it, something about how we couldn’t handle it. My feeling was, had it been a Republican president, we’d been out with the first announcement.
On January 27, 1967, I was home watching Time Tunnel when there was bulletin about a fire in the Apollo 1 capsule. I don’t remember if the first bulletin said that the astronauts had been killed or not, but their deaths were eventually reported. As a Hoosier, the report hit extra hard. Gus Grissom was from Mitchell, Indiana, and Ed White and Roger Chaffee, with Grisson, frequented lakes in Indiana for water-skiing, including Lake James, where my oldest sister and her husband lived.
April 4, 1968, I was similarly in front of the TV watching, I think, The Flying Nun or Bewitched when the first reports of the shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King began to come over the TV. I’m sure the first reports didn’t say that the shots were fatal, but those reports weren’t long in coming. I was home alone (14 year old, in my freshman year of high school). When my mother got home, I told her about it. She initially thought the shooter was a follower of Stokely Carmichael. I also remember, the following day, a Friday, I stayed up to watch Johnny Carson and he had to start the show explaining that it was taped around 6:30 pm and they didn’t have the news about Dr. King’s shooting yet.
June 5, 1968, I got up and the first thing I did was look at the morning paper to see if Robert F. Kennedy had won the primary in California the night before. The paper said that he had and, happy, I went into our living room and turned on the television. There were newsmen talking about something and I didn’t know what it was until one of them said something about Rose Kennedy being asked about another son being shot. The rest of that day was essentially a death watch with Senator Kennedy dying the following day. The rest of the week was all about the funeral. That Friday, Johnny Carson had his only show for that week after the shooting and it was a serious discussion of the assassination and the society in which it took place.
Challenger I talk about in another reply.
Septemeber 11, 2001, I didn’t get up until about noon. I had a job where I didn’t have to be at work until about 3 pm. My mother was living with me at the time, and she had the TV on. I saw Dan Rather was already on the air, so I asked why. That’s when I learned about the WTC, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania (where I would later twice visit the site of the crash, though the memorial at both times was really a shack). I spent all my time at work, while working, listening to NPR’s extended coverage of the next few days.
Similarly, on February 1, 2003, I got out of bed, again found my mother watching Dan Rather when he would not normally be on, and learned about Columbia. Again, a lot on NPR that day, though Garrison Keillor went ahead with his scheduled joke episode of A Prairie Home Companion, taking time to describe it as “a dark day” for the country, but feeling a lot of people might need some laughter, so that’s why he went through with the show.
Yes, there are a lot of other “I remember where I was” moments in my life, but these are the ones that stick out in my mind.
9/11
I was unemployed at the time, I was listening to Howard Stern on the radio and a caller had said a plane hit the WTC. Howard thought the caller was fooling with him, then Robin broke in saying it was true.
I switched to the TV and watched the rest of the day before, during, and after the 2nd plane hit, and as the buildings collapsed…
I was in class (tenth grade, Hillcrest High, Simpsonville SC), when the principal announced it over the PA.
I understand that one of the other kids my age – in another classroom – cheered aloud.
He was an áššhølë, anyway.
I was in my high school classroom. A teacher walked in rolling a television, warned up that no one better dare laugh, and plugged in the television, showing us the news report and explosion. It was something hard to process, accepting that what looked like a scene out of a science fiction movie had actually just happened.
This was the first event where I could remember exactly where I was and who told me. I mean I remember the day Reagan was shot. I remember the day John Lennon was shot. I remember huddling around TVs and watching the news coverage of those events, but I don’t remember exactly where I was and what time it was.
I was just a pup, new to my office and the manager walked in the room. We were getting ready to go to a catered lunch and he said he just heard the shuttle blew up. His tone was so matter of fact that I thought he was making a joke in poor taste, but he was the boss, so I said nothing.
We then proceeded to walk out of the office and go to lunch, which lasted about an hour. By the time we got back, the news was all over the building and we turned on the office TV set, which was only on during special events. We turned on a network station, (I think CBS with Dan Rather) and they had cut into regular broadcasting. This was 1986, afterall, and most people still relied on TV sets that picked up broadcast signals. Cable was new and it certainly wasn’t available for a TV set that was only on a few hours a month.
They showed explosion over and over again on all the different broadcast networks. They even cancelled Reagan’s State of the Union address.
The next event I could remember exactly where I was, was the beginning of the first Gulf War. But that’s another story. 29 years. So hard to believe.
I was in elementary school…I want to say 4th grade. We’d been following news of the Challenger launch for some time, in class, and I believe we were supposed to watch a raplay of the launch that day. I can’t remember why we didn’t watch it live…I lived a time zone away from Florida, so perhaps the launch was at an inconvinent time. Anyhow, our teacher came in and told us what had happened. Later, when I was in high school, I learned that my chemistry teacher had applied for the same program as Christa McAullife.
Was at work. Word of mouth reached us. Someone found a radio and we listened for a while.
The thing was, I acknowledged it as a tragedy and was saddened at the loss of the individuals, but I remembered Apollo I, Apollo XIII and some of the close calls in earlier missions, not to mention deaths of test pilots involved in the program. Being out on the frontier is dangerous business, especially when they cut corners on the design thanks to military design input.
As the fictional Q put it, “It’s dangerous. If you can’t take a bloody nose, you have no business being out here.”
What did get me was when I was at ladyfriend’s place later that day. She’d sounded as though she could use moral support and she did. Not so much because of the accident, nor that Crista was a teacher (as was ladyfriend – substitute grade school teacher) but because of her students’ reactions when the news went out on the school’s PA system. Essentially, they shrugged and said “They asked for it. You wouldn’t catch me doing something stupid like going out there in a tin can.” Words to that effect. Having both grown up during the space race, she and I could only despair of what had happened to the species that the new generation had so thoroughly turned its back on our greatest achievement.