Remembering the Challenger Disaster
When the original space shuttle went up some time in the spring of 1981, I made sure to wear red, white and blue that day. I knew that the quest for the moon in the 60's had been very important, and though my life path would not lead to me working in a scientific industry, I was still interested in space exploration. At the very least, I was aware that ships were still going up and that it was a good thing.
January 28, 1986, I was a freshman at the University of Southern Maine. I was in the student center/cafeteria on the Gorham campus with one of my best college buds, Jake, it being lunchtime. The cafeteria staff usually had the PA system on and tuned to music or a news broadcast, at a low volume; the news was on.
I can't remember whether Jake or I was first to hear. At one point, though, we stopped eating and talking to have the following exchange, "Funny, I thought I just heard something about an accident with the space shuttle." "I thought I heard the same thing, too!" "Accident", to me, could have meant anything. I hadn't imagined a complete failure and loss of life at that point.
(Cue leaving the cafeteria and bumping into a mutual friend of Jake and I. He had a proclivity for doing or saying anything to get a rise out of me. "The shuttle blew up!" I said. "Yeah! Cool, huh?" He would probably be embarrassed that I remember, and because of this I've purposely omitted his name.)
The cafeteria was directly over the student pub (same had a big-screen TV) and the college radio station at which I'd begun working a few days before. I went down to that floor because I'd get information on the accident from either source. Sure enough, the TV was tuned to live coverage of the accident and I saw the footage of the accident for the first time. My heart was hammering with not knowing how it would turn out. First that suspicious plume trailing down the side of one of the tanks, then the explosion and enormous apple-shaped cloud, then the two contrails going right and left in that huge "Y" shape. "No one could live through that," I thought, "could they?"
I had been aware that this flight would carry the first "civilian" space traveller, someone not with the military or someone with a Ph.D in a hard science. Some months before the accident Life magazine ran an article on who wanted to go, or who might go. Two notables featured were Walter Cronkite and John Denver. I don't think I'm conflating that I remember Christa McAuliffe being featured in that article, standing beside a considerable stack of books she had to read to qualify for the flight. (A typical non-civilian astronaut and his/her far-larger stack of books stood beside her.) I can't remember whether I knew or not that the "first teacher in space" was on that flight.
School children the nation over were watching the shuttle take off, but for the gathering of students in Concord, NH the launch had especial importance: Christa was one of their own, a history teacher at Concord High School. I was briefly married to someone who'd been a high school student there at the time. His recollection of Christa was very positive; while most of the teachers at CHS went through the motions and often didn't show any liking for their work or the kids, Christa did. He wanted to get into her history class but couldn't, probably because of low grades. (He eventually dropped out because of other chronic problems with the school.)
The media pestered students at CHS and he joined or led a posse together to protect kids from the daily gauntlet of reporters who wanted a statement (or so ex-hubby said). At one point when he'd had enough he said he'd called them "you jackals" to their faces. He was not a good man to be married to. If there was any truth to his say-so in the days immediately following the disaster, I hope he's judged for that and not how he treated me.
Maybe it was about the time that the TV movie "Challenger" with Karen Allen came out that we took a spin around Blossom Hill Cemetery to find the Catholic section where she was buried. We didn't find it nor her grave. The Concord Monitor reported that the "Challenger" movie had been "quietly" received by area residents; I can't remember that my in-laws watched it. Hubby and I surely didn't.
Funny thing was that I started reading Richard Feynman's autobiography _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ without being fully cognizant of his role in the Challenger investigation. I heard that winter/spring of 1986, somehow, about the o-ring dropped into the glass of ice water. I didn't know Feynman had been the drop-ee. _Surely You're Joking..._ was the book I heard lauded by the USM chancellor at the beginning of my freshman year (1985). A year later one of my professors praised the same book, riffing on the same anecdote: about how Feynman inquired why a juggled cafeteria plate moved the way it did. When someone expressed skepticism about the usefulness of such an inquiry, Feynman retorted that "it's fun to find out stuff". I didn't immediately taken that advice close to heart (and maybe still haven't taken it fully enough) but the anecdote and the double-helping of title-check meant that I eventually read _Surely You're Joking..._. If there's any lesson I can learn from same, I'm sure it will club me with the necessary cognitive 2x4, probably on a subsequent re-read. At the very least, I became a Feynman fan. Not too shabby for someone who struggled through algebra.
The current economic climate is not a good one to support a space program. Great Bird of the Galaxy knows there have always been nuffers to scorn it, usually citing unnamed hungry or jobless people here on Earth who deserve funding more than NASA. Certainly the 2003 Columbia disaster also put the viability of a space program in jeopardy. The news does not look good.
Yet it seems that even after the disaster there were folks who wanted to go up. Even though government funding of spaceflight might dry up, private excursions could still happen. Heck, we've got a start on the Int'l Space Station. Let's not quit now.
Lest my encouragement sound like so much moonshine, I'd like to reference a conversation I had last summer with a cancer survivor. We got to talking about those frequently-nebulous improvements that space exploration has provided for the ordinary person. I've taken it as _fait accompli_ that space exploration has improved my (and your) life without knowing how it's happened. He with whom I was speaking knew that developments in medical imaging, which have a basis in space technology, meant that his cancer was caught when it was still treatable. Given that I have to have some pretty sophisticated imaging done of me every so often, I conceded the point.
1986 was a pretty bad year for technology, as months after Challenger there was the Chernobyl disaster. Neither could be treated as a mere skinned knee, as a toddler might get. But far better to shake it off than never walk again.
January 28, 1986, I was a freshman at the University of Southern Maine. I was in the student center/cafeteria on the Gorham campus with one of my best college buds, Jake, it being lunchtime. The cafeteria staff usually had the PA system on and tuned to music or a news broadcast, at a low volume; the news was on.
I can't remember whether Jake or I was first to hear. At one point, though, we stopped eating and talking to have the following exchange, "Funny, I thought I just heard something about an accident with the space shuttle." "I thought I heard the same thing, too!" "Accident", to me, could have meant anything. I hadn't imagined a complete failure and loss of life at that point.
(Cue leaving the cafeteria and bumping into a mutual friend of Jake and I. He had a proclivity for doing or saying anything to get a rise out of me. "The shuttle blew up!" I said. "Yeah! Cool, huh?" He would probably be embarrassed that I remember, and because of this I've purposely omitted his name.)
The cafeteria was directly over the student pub (same had a big-screen TV) and the college radio station at which I'd begun working a few days before. I went down to that floor because I'd get information on the accident from either source. Sure enough, the TV was tuned to live coverage of the accident and I saw the footage of the accident for the first time. My heart was hammering with not knowing how it would turn out. First that suspicious plume trailing down the side of one of the tanks, then the explosion and enormous apple-shaped cloud, then the two contrails going right and left in that huge "Y" shape. "No one could live through that," I thought, "could they?"
I had been aware that this flight would carry the first "civilian" space traveller, someone not with the military or someone with a Ph.D in a hard science. Some months before the accident Life magazine ran an article on who wanted to go, or who might go. Two notables featured were Walter Cronkite and John Denver. I don't think I'm conflating that I remember Christa McAuliffe being featured in that article, standing beside a considerable stack of books she had to read to qualify for the flight. (A typical non-civilian astronaut and his/her far-larger stack of books stood beside her.) I can't remember whether I knew or not that the "first teacher in space" was on that flight.
School children the nation over were watching the shuttle take off, but for the gathering of students in Concord, NH the launch had especial importance: Christa was one of their own, a history teacher at Concord High School. I was briefly married to someone who'd been a high school student there at the time. His recollection of Christa was very positive; while most of the teachers at CHS went through the motions and often didn't show any liking for their work or the kids, Christa did. He wanted to get into her history class but couldn't, probably because of low grades. (He eventually dropped out because of other chronic problems with the school.)
The media pestered students at CHS and he joined or led a posse together to protect kids from the daily gauntlet of reporters who wanted a statement (or so ex-hubby said). At one point when he'd had enough he said he'd called them "you jackals" to their faces. He was not a good man to be married to. If there was any truth to his say-so in the days immediately following the disaster, I hope he's judged for that and not how he treated me.
Maybe it was about the time that the TV movie "Challenger" with Karen Allen came out that we took a spin around Blossom Hill Cemetery to find the Catholic section where she was buried. We didn't find it nor her grave. The Concord Monitor reported that the "Challenger" movie had been "quietly" received by area residents; I can't remember that my in-laws watched it. Hubby and I surely didn't.
Funny thing was that I started reading Richard Feynman's autobiography _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ without being fully cognizant of his role in the Challenger investigation. I heard that winter/spring of 1986, somehow, about the o-ring dropped into the glass of ice water. I didn't know Feynman had been the drop-ee. _Surely You're Joking..._ was the book I heard lauded by the USM chancellor at the beginning of my freshman year (1985). A year later one of my professors praised the same book, riffing on the same anecdote: about how Feynman inquired why a juggled cafeteria plate moved the way it did. When someone expressed skepticism about the usefulness of such an inquiry, Feynman retorted that "it's fun to find out stuff". I didn't immediately taken that advice close to heart (and maybe still haven't taken it fully enough) but the anecdote and the double-helping of title-check meant that I eventually read _Surely You're Joking..._. If there's any lesson I can learn from same, I'm sure it will club me with the necessary cognitive 2x4, probably on a subsequent re-read. At the very least, I became a Feynman fan. Not too shabby for someone who struggled through algebra.
The current economic climate is not a good one to support a space program. Great Bird of the Galaxy knows there have always been nuffers to scorn it, usually citing unnamed hungry or jobless people here on Earth who deserve funding more than NASA. Certainly the 2003 Columbia disaster also put the viability of a space program in jeopardy. The news does not look good.
Yet it seems that even after the disaster there were folks who wanted to go up. Even though government funding of spaceflight might dry up, private excursions could still happen. Heck, we've got a start on the Int'l Space Station. Let's not quit now.
Lest my encouragement sound like so much moonshine, I'd like to reference a conversation I had last summer with a cancer survivor. We got to talking about those frequently-nebulous improvements that space exploration has provided for the ordinary person. I've taken it as _fait accompli_ that space exploration has improved my (and your) life without knowing how it's happened. He with whom I was speaking knew that developments in medical imaging, which have a basis in space technology, meant that his cancer was caught when it was still treatable. Given that I have to have some pretty sophisticated imaging done of me every so often, I conceded the point.
1986 was a pretty bad year for technology, as months after Challenger there was the Chernobyl disaster. Neither could be treated as a mere skinned knee, as a toddler might get. But far better to shake it off than never walk again.