Space Shuttle Challenger
Created | Updated Feb 13, 2002
The day the Space Shuttle Challenger was launched, I was in college. It was 1986, and the event, being one of the earliest shuttle launches, was unusual enough to be covered on live TV, cameras watching events as they unfolded. I had just returned to my campus accommodation after a lecture, and my friends were all gathered around a portable TV in the communal kitchen, waiting for the launch to begin.
Everything happened in that kitchen. It was a huge room with a view out over the sports fields, sinks that were always full of used plates and pans, cookers that seldom got a sniff of Ajax, and lockers for food which were all padlocked to prevent the theft of pot-noodles and Kellogs Frosties. In the centre were several white formica tables all pushed together, and it was on these tables that everyone was perched, their attention fixed on the TV.
The TV belonged to Andy, who was rumoured to be the product of.... gasp.... middle-class upbringing. Once when entertaining his girlfriend for supper he produced a meal of grilled whole trout, instead of beans on toast. Only Andy knew how to do that. Only Andy had two TVs. One in his room, and another in the kitchen.
Almost time for the countdown. I sat on the table with the others, next to my boyfriend. It was exciting. I remembered watching a similar event about a year before, when an earlier space-shuttle had come back to earth. I had been at a party at the time, one of those drunken teenage parties where relationships are made and broken, where the drinks cabinet gets broken into, and nearly everyone kneels to pray to the porcelain. Only this party had been different, because when the shuttle landed, everyone stopped drinking and dancing to sit and watch the TV, somehow sensing the importance of the occasion just as our parents had watched the first landing of man on the Moon.
Five... four... three... two... one... blast off! The rockets fired the shuttle into the blue Florida sky, an impressive sight.
But what's this? Something wrong? It all happened in an instant, but those short moments seemed to stretch silently towards infinity. The rockets exploded in a ball of flame, the shuttle and it's occupants utterly destroyed. We stared at the TV, each one of us stunned into silence. Someone swore.
It was a harsh reminder that the remarkable technology that could launch people into space, was also fallible, something that had never crossed my mind before. At that party the previous year someone had made a feeble and not-very-funny joke about Soviets shooting down the US shuttle, but we never dreamed that there could be such a catastrophic failure of the technology itself.
One by one we filtered away, small groups or couples; others alone, to think or talk quietly about what had just happened. It is one thing to hear about a tragedy reported on the news, it is another thing entirely to watch it happen, unfolding second by second, and we were all affected by what we had seen.
There had been a civillian on board, a schoolteacher. I think that was what touched me the most deeply. There have been many tragedies since that day, some involving much greater loss of life, but I will always remember the day the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed.
Everything happened in that kitchen. It was a huge room with a view out over the sports fields, sinks that were always full of used plates and pans, cookers that seldom got a sniff of Ajax, and lockers for food which were all padlocked to prevent the theft of pot-noodles and Kellogs Frosties. In the centre were several white formica tables all pushed together, and it was on these tables that everyone was perched, their attention fixed on the TV.
The TV belonged to Andy, who was rumoured to be the product of.... gasp.... middle-class upbringing. Once when entertaining his girlfriend for supper he produced a meal of grilled whole trout, instead of beans on toast. Only Andy knew how to do that. Only Andy had two TVs. One in his room, and another in the kitchen.
Almost time for the countdown. I sat on the table with the others, next to my boyfriend. It was exciting. I remembered watching a similar event about a year before, when an earlier space-shuttle had come back to earth. I had been at a party at the time, one of those drunken teenage parties where relationships are made and broken, where the drinks cabinet gets broken into, and nearly everyone kneels to pray to the porcelain. Only this party had been different, because when the shuttle landed, everyone stopped drinking and dancing to sit and watch the TV, somehow sensing the importance of the occasion just as our parents had watched the first landing of man on the Moon.
Five... four... three... two... one... blast off! The rockets fired the shuttle into the blue Florida sky, an impressive sight.
But what's this? Something wrong? It all happened in an instant, but those short moments seemed to stretch silently towards infinity. The rockets exploded in a ball of flame, the shuttle and it's occupants utterly destroyed. We stared at the TV, each one of us stunned into silence. Someone swore.
It was a harsh reminder that the remarkable technology that could launch people into space, was also fallible, something that had never crossed my mind before. At that party the previous year someone had made a feeble and not-very-funny joke about Soviets shooting down the US shuttle, but we never dreamed that there could be such a catastrophic failure of the technology itself.
One by one we filtered away, small groups or couples; others alone, to think or talk quietly about what had just happened. It is one thing to hear about a tragedy reported on the news, it is another thing entirely to watch it happen, unfolding second by second, and we were all affected by what we had seen.
There had been a civillian on board, a schoolteacher. I think that was what touched me the most deeply. There have been many tragedies since that day, some involving much greater loss of life, but I will always remember the day the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed.
