I was a huge fan of the manned space program when I was growing up. In the pre-computer days, the space program generally and manned space flight particularly, fascinated budding geeks. I was up well before dawn to watch launches in Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. I stayed up until late in the night to watch grainy photographs being beamed back to earth, and from thence to our TV set. These were the pre-VCR days, and light years prior to Tivo.
I watched the first shuttle launch; as the shuttle program rolled on with spectacular successes, the networks stopped covering launches live, and we all settled into a phase of complacency about space travel; we were conquerors, we had it down. Look at those successes!
On January 28, 1986, CNN was the only network to broadcast the launch live. I remember exactly where I was when it happened; I was at LAX boarding a flight for New Orleans. I saw the explosion, and didn’t immediately realize what happened. I boarded my flight thinking the crew would be injured, but rescuable. Only when I turned on the TV in my NO hotel room did I learn that my hopes for the crew’s survival had not come to pass.
The Challenger crew were heros, not because they lost their lives. No, they are heros because they believed in a mission, risky and fraught with peril though it was, enough to risk their lives attempting to advance humankind.
The crew of STS-51-L: Front row from left, Mike Smith, Dick Scobee, Ron McNair. Back row from left, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, Judith Resnik.
In Memory of the Challenger Crew: January 28, 1986.
-k-
Photo and crew names from NASA’s website.
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