Space Shuttle Challenger: 22 years ago today
Today is the anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. On January 28, 1986, NASA’s 25th space mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the crew of seven astronauts, 4 were women and minorities and for the first time, one, a New Hampshire school teacher named Christa McAuliffe, was to be the first civilian in space.
73 seconds after takeoff, the craft exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. There were no survivors.
That evening, President Reagan was to give the State of the Union Address. He instead went on television from the Oval Office and spoke of the tragedy.
There’s a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God." (full text)
Two years ago, on this day, I wrote this essay. It was a great honor to me that it was published a few days in the newspaper that had given me my first job, the Baltimore Sun.
It was 20 years ago this week that my generation, the Xers of slacking, hip-hop and dot com foolery stopped being children. Many of us, including myself, were in junior high, others still played in sandboxes on that freezing clear morning in January of 1986. But just as my parents had seen the promise of their generation “born in this century, tempered by war” cut down by gunfire in Dallas, my own had seen the hopes of President Kennedy’s “new frontier” extinguished in a horrific plume of flame off the coast of Florida .
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster served the first memory of national mourning for those of us born too late for Vietnam and Kent State, too young to remember President Nixon’s resignation. I wasn’t sent home from school early, as my mother was in November of 1963 but did spend that day, as she did, in front of the television with my family. Later at school and for weeks afterward, any discussion of the Challenger began with the same question: “When were you when you heard?”
We use that question not only find comfort in collective grief but to pinpoint a generation’s understanding of itself. “Where were you when” makes us both witnesses to history and characters in a chapter of its passing. It forces us to accept our own story as part of a larger national tale, where children raised on the space-bound dreams of Star Wars can see a real life launch go horribly wrong and where a school teacher, just like ours, can touch the sky with her whole community watching and never come home.
Looking back, Crista McAuliffe and her crewmates were a window into the social concerns of our future. Over half the Challenger crew were women and minorities, paving the way for our national dialogue on diversity. McAuliffe’s presence, a civilian representative on a government mission hinted at later struggles over what levels of participation and accountability citizens would expect in national affairs. Most of all, the destruction of the Challenger rang a symbolic death knell on the fundamentalism of the Cold War into which we had been born. It showed that even our nation’s largest achievements could be undone by something as mundane as an “O-Ring” and that we, like the Soviets, like everyone, were both human and flawed.
It’s possible to accept that generational divides are both the invention of marketers and useful tools in distinguishing the disciples of Lil’ Jon from those of John Lennon. They also stave off our own feelings of irrelevancy as we become the adults mystified about "kids these days".
At their best, generation do the same work as maturity: To help us feel part of a history larger than our own.
It would be years before America would mourn collectively again, years before Oaklahoma City and the death of John Kennedy Jr, before Columbine and September 11. By then, my peers were in their 20s and 30s, ending school, starting careers and families. I remember where I was on each of those days, just as I remember the Space Shuttle Challenger and 7th grade Spanish period. Our teacher, well known around school for not speaking English during class, tried to explain what had happened, making imaginary plumes of flame with her hands, drawing a fireball on the chalkboard, hoping the barrier of language would lessen the impact. But when she broke down and told us, it was too late. We had grown up anyway.
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Every generation has one of those ‘you never forget where you were’ moments. I had hoped that for our generation, this would be it, but of course, that was not to be.
I remember exactly where I was when the Challenger exploded. I was in 5th grade, at the Drew School, eating lunch. As I was walking back to class, one of the other kids ran up and said that the Space Shuttle had exploded. Now, it should be noted that I’ve pretty much blocked most of my pre-9th grade years from my memory, but in this instance, I remember EXACTLY what I said:
“The Space Shuttle can’t blow up.”
I wish I had been right.
Every generation has one of those ‘you never forget where you were’ moments. I had hoped that for our generation, this would be it, but of course, that was not to be.
I remember exactly where I was when the Challenger exploded. I was in 5th grade, at the Drew School, eating lunch. As I was walking back to class, one of the other kids ran up and said that the Space Shuttle had exploded. Now, it should be noted that I’ve pretty much blocked most of my pre-9th grade years from my memory, but in this instance, I remember EXACTLY what I said:
“The Space Shuttle can’t blow up.”
I wish I had been right.