Godspeed Challenger

[wiliqueen]

(crossposted from my pro blog)

Thirty years ago today, about ten minutes into chemistry class, the phone rang.

Before that moment, I don't think any of us had really noticed that there was a phone in the science room. We all stared, bewildered, as our teacher walked over, picked it up, listened silently for a moment, and put it back down. Then,

Comments

[diannelamerc]

Wow. So well written.

I had the day off from school-no internet, of course, no one else around, not even a book I hadn't read. I'd planned to binge-watch tv all day and when I woke up there was nothing else on. Not on any channel, not all day long. I finally turned it off when the endless repetition of the same newsbit and video shot drove me so mad I actually just preferred to sit alone and stare at a wall. (I didn't even have my mom to talk to until 6pm.)

I know I had a weird experience of it, and can't even really imagine what it would be like to experience with other people. Or if I had actually been one of the kids who'd even known the launch was that day, much less one of the crying kids they dug out for the cameras whose entire school had gotten up and come in early to school assembly so everyone could watch.

I ended up infuriated by the repetition of the video, and endless speculation over how this was crushing the hopes and dreams of all the children all across America, if not the world. I was 16. It was sad, sure, but accidents happen and you ran out of things to report hours ago. Surely *something* else had happened on the damned planet that day. But 8 channels on the tv and not a one would be the first to break away I guess.

So yeah, very different experience for me (than that of most people). This write up actually helps give me some insight into how and why this was a real emotional milestone for so many people-something it took me years to even begin to understand.

[wiliqueen]

Oh, man, that would have driven me SO insane. I don't blame you a bit.

I was done after an hour, probably not even that. And yeah, it was pretty much all we talked about all day -- I think maybe they let school out early, but I can't remember for sure -- but at least we stopped watching it.

I didn't want to see any more of it until we started to get a "why" (which took at least a few days, even for hypotheticals -- IIRC, it was months before we even started to hear about the O-ring issue -- but I kept looking back at it over the next few days, hoping we'd find out something new.

[diannelamerc]

Oh good. It occurred to me only after I was AFK for most of the day that this could have come off as threadcrapping, and I didn't mean it to.

Yeah, I lasted several hours out of sheer boredom and hope they would finish up, and had no one to discuss it with. And I felt like such a heartless bitch for so long because I didn't feel devastated or traumatized (like the TV kept telling me everyone was) and then went further and ended up angry and resenting it because of the 'enforced' coverage I experienced. Such very different experiences of the same thing at basically the same age.

And I thought the O-ring thing came up within a few days, but it was a long time before they established that it was a solid contender, much less confirmed that it was indeed the fail point. (Then again, I was so pointedly Sick And Tired Of The Damned Thing And Over It Already before the end of the same day, so I wasn't paying attention to continuing coverage nearly the way you were.)

[wiliqueen]

And I thought the O-ring thing came up within a few days

It could very well have, and me be remembering completely wrong.

But no, not threadcrapping at all. It was very clear that you were putting pieces together, and I'm glad mine were useful. :-)

[diannelamerc]

I just got sort of annoyed because I was sure that at least seven other people had died tragic deaths in car accidents or fires or whatever that same day and I didn't quite understand why everyone was so much more upset about these seven people. (For context, I'd experienced more than my share of death by that point in my young life--cancer, murder, tornado, and even unexplained--and had a very fatalistic attitude about the fact that we all inevitably die and I couldn't understand why other people always acted so surprised by that fact. In hindsight, I realize that for many of my generation, this was their first realization that even teachers and astronauts die.)

This.

I hadn't actually seen as much death by that point as you had (it sounds like), but I had seen some and had the same attitude.* I realized many teens & kids were having that "first" experience and (at the sensitive and all-knowing age of 16) wanted to smack everyone with the reality stick so they would stop circling around the idea in incomprehension. "Everyone dies. Accidents happen. This is life, people!"

* Although, admittedly, by that point I'd many years before come to accept that I would never live to see 30 because of imminent Cold War nuclear destruction. From pretty much the first time I seriously registered the threat I never feared it; I simply accepted it as a reality of life. That might have tweaked my attitude pretty early.

(And, to sideline a bit:) I pretty much have the same attitude now, and had much the same reaction to 9/11. Yes it was a shock. Yes it was terrible. Yes so many people died and so much damage was done. But I swear 50% of people's reaction was overwhelming shock that "this could happen in the USA?!?". Um, we were (and generally are at any given moment) pissing off more people around the world (for reasons both sane and not) than anyone else on Earth. The shock was that no one had done it sooner. You piss off lots of violently inclined people and they retaliate. Someone was bound to succeed. Loving your country shouldn't mean thinking it's somehow magically immune from the realities of the world. I had the same frustration and impatience with the people in shock that "such a thing as this could happen on American soil!" that I'd had 15 years before.

[wiliqueen]

Hee! Thank you, but it's fine. :-)

I didn't assume the nuclear annihilation would happen, but I did reach the conclusion by about 13 that if it did, I'd never know it, being ~75 miles as the crow flies from Cheyenne Mountain.

For some reason, people found it very unnerving when I mentioned that at the time, so I didn't very often...