A Generation Lost in Space...
Wow. Now this is been a while since I wrote. Crazy…
Man, I feel insanely old today.
That is because as I was watching the morning news, the reporters mentioned that today is the 25th anniversary of the infamous Challenger Explosion… the 1980s “Do you Remember Where You Were?” incident.
To be honest, I’m not sure what the mean age of my f-list is. Most likely everyone who is about 28 years old and under will have no memory of this (or extremely vague); and everyone 25 and under was probably wasn’t even born yet. But for those few of you who do remember, you probably were a young Generation Xer like me and remembering seeing this, live, in school (or, depended where you lived... live).
I remember 1986… I was 7 years old and in 1st grade. Today, 25 years ago, the teachers for out school’s three, first grade classes, crammed into one classroom, so we could watch the launch of the Challenger Shuttle. My teacher told our class about this the previous Friday and, frankly, all of us were pretty psyched about this.
Laugh as you will, but this was a very big deal for us. Not only were we a Space Race generation raised on "Jedi", "Star Wars (the Reagan program, not the movie)", “the coolness of Outer Space” and “the promise of living on a Moon bases by 2010”-but TV in the classroom was just becoming a common occurance (thanks to cheap VCRs and programming like “3-2-1 Contact”) For us, this rivaled “Fight Over Who Got to Use One of the Three Computers in Our Lab” Day.
The only other people who were more excited about this were all the teachers in out school, who were ecstatic that a school teacher was aboard-and not just any teacher, a FEMALE teacher. She was the face of President Reagen's brand-new "Teacher in Space" program. Every teacher in America wanted their classes to see this; mostly they wanted all the girls to see this.
I know, this is hard for some younger kids to understand, but this was still a time when girls were taught that women perused “women’s jobs”… astronaut was sill border-line, but we had a shot; thanks to role models like Sally Ride and Astronaut Barbie.
Oh, and don't forget Dr. Ronald McNair, who was only the second African-American astronaut... ever. And Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian-Amercain astronaut... ever. Yes, NASA was around for 27 years and leave it to the 1980s to acomplish THIS.
And, this idea spured our teachers into shoving 80 chatty, squirmy, corduroy wearing children into a single, capacity for 30 classroom for 45 minutes; to them, it was well worth the stress for us to witness a seemingly historic event; over half the crew were minorties.
They would have never had guessed just how historic…
We were getting antsy to watch the shuttle launch. After listening to (what we kids were complaining of as boring) news commentary, the time arrived as the Challenger was going for launch. All of us in the room were cheering as the shuttle lifted up. To our little brains, this was one of the most awesome things we had ever seen. Then, after a while, our cheering changed to confusion as the Challenger just exploded. On live television! To be honest, none of us really had any idea just what had happened-we were little kids who had always equated “fireball” and “Space Shuttle” as everything being good… after all, that’s how the astronauts got to Outer Space, right? It never really occurred to us that we just witnessed seven people die right in front of us; all we saw was a “spaceship blowing up”. But, we all had a feeling that something bad happened, because I (and most likely the rest of the classes) remember hearing my teacher yelling “Oh no!” from the back of the classroom. Before we knew it, another one of the teachers quickly walked up to the TV, shut it off, and turned on the lights. Then, one teacher began to explain to us what happened while the others went to, most likely, spread the news.
For those next weeks, I remember that just about everything revolved around the Challenger explosion. Our school’s councilor made rounds in all the classrooms, sit-coms has episodes dealing with the subject and news channels showing re-runs of the footage.
And, despite being one of those “Challenger Kids”, I still wanted to become an astronaut when I grew up. After all, as every Gen-Xer knows... Outer Space is totally radical, dude!
Man, I feel insanely old today.
That is because as I was watching the morning news, the reporters mentioned that today is the 25th anniversary of the infamous Challenger Explosion… the 1980s “Do you Remember Where You Were?” incident.
To be honest, I’m not sure what the mean age of my f-list is. Most likely everyone who is about 28 years old and under will have no memory of this (or extremely vague); and everyone 25 and under was probably wasn’t even born yet. But for those few of you who do remember, you probably were a young Generation Xer like me and remembering seeing this, live, in school (or, depended where you lived... live).
I remember 1986… I was 7 years old and in 1st grade. Today, 25 years ago, the teachers for out school’s three, first grade classes, crammed into one classroom, so we could watch the launch of the Challenger Shuttle. My teacher told our class about this the previous Friday and, frankly, all of us were pretty psyched about this.
Laugh as you will, but this was a very big deal for us. Not only were we a Space Race generation raised on "Jedi", "Star Wars (the Reagan program, not the movie)", “the coolness of Outer Space” and “the promise of living on a Moon bases by 2010”-but TV in the classroom was just becoming a common occurance (thanks to cheap VCRs and programming like “3-2-1 Contact”) For us, this rivaled “Fight Over Who Got to Use One of the Three Computers in Our Lab” Day.
The only other people who were more excited about this were all the teachers in out school, who were ecstatic that a school teacher was aboard-and not just any teacher, a FEMALE teacher. She was the face of President Reagen's brand-new "Teacher in Space" program. Every teacher in America wanted their classes to see this; mostly they wanted all the girls to see this.
I know, this is hard for some younger kids to understand, but this was still a time when girls were taught that women perused “women’s jobs”… astronaut was sill border-line, but we had a shot; thanks to role models like Sally Ride and Astronaut Barbie.
Oh, and don't forget Dr. Ronald McNair, who was only the second African-American astronaut... ever. And Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian-Amercain astronaut... ever. Yes, NASA was around for 27 years and leave it to the 1980s to acomplish THIS.
And, this idea spured our teachers into shoving 80 chatty, squirmy, corduroy wearing children into a single, capacity for 30 classroom for 45 minutes; to them, it was well worth the stress for us to witness a seemingly historic event; over half the crew were minorties.
They would have never had guessed just how historic…
We were getting antsy to watch the shuttle launch. After listening to (what we kids were complaining of as boring) news commentary, the time arrived as the Challenger was going for launch. All of us in the room were cheering as the shuttle lifted up. To our little brains, this was one of the most awesome things we had ever seen. Then, after a while, our cheering changed to confusion as the Challenger just exploded. On live television! To be honest, none of us really had any idea just what had happened-we were little kids who had always equated “fireball” and “Space Shuttle” as everything being good… after all, that’s how the astronauts got to Outer Space, right? It never really occurred to us that we just witnessed seven people die right in front of us; all we saw was a “spaceship blowing up”. But, we all had a feeling that something bad happened, because I (and most likely the rest of the classes) remember hearing my teacher yelling “Oh no!” from the back of the classroom. Before we knew it, another one of the teachers quickly walked up to the TV, shut it off, and turned on the lights. Then, one teacher began to explain to us what happened while the others went to, most likely, spread the news.
For those next weeks, I remember that just about everything revolved around the Challenger explosion. Our school’s councilor made rounds in all the classrooms, sit-coms has episodes dealing with the subject and news channels showing re-runs of the footage.
And, despite being one of those “Challenger Kids”, I still wanted to become an astronaut when I grew up. After all, as every Gen-Xer knows... Outer Space is totally radical, dude!