Every generation, it seems, has some huge disaster associated with it. Ask a Baby Boomer, for instance, where they were when JFK was assassinated, and they can remember it with chilling clarity. What they were doing, who they were with, what they felt, what they did just after they heard the news, everything. Go further back; there are more disasters: the Korean War, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the sinking of the Lusitania, the sinking of the Titanic...
The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger is the disaster of my generation. Most of us were smack in the middle of adolescence, when life is so much sharper and more acute than it is in other periods. Most of us had never seen a day when there hadn't been a space program. I myself was born on the third anniversary of the first moon landing. My grandfather helped build the lunar rover. I knew there had been a time when humans hadn't been in space; but I have never really been able to imagine it -- it's book knowledge to me, the knowledge of history.
My generation has been audience to the shuttle program for years. I was about eight or nine when the very first shuttle was launched, and I remember watching it on TV. When I was in Girl Scouts, I even earned a science badge by studying the shuttle program in some detail. It was fascinating -- a first, but not the first time we were ever in space. We'd always been in space, by the time I was born.
I can remember exactly where I was when the Challenger blew up. I was in Social Studies class, studying World Geography. The new semester had recently started, and we were having a quiet study day. I remember it was early in the morning, and it was cold and frosty (being January in Seattle). My classmates and I scarcely even looked up from our desks when an administrator came into the room, walked over to our teacher, spoke quietly with him for a few moments, then left...
A few minutes later she came back, wheeling a TV on a cart. She turned it on.
For the next thirty minutes, we sat in stunned, rapt silence, watching the space shuttle Challenger explode, over and over and over again. Nobody spoke a single word. Nobody could believe it.
Sometimes, I still can't believe it. We lost six astronauts and a teacher in the accident. I've seen the footage a thousand times over, and I still can't get over it. I think it's written on my mind forever. To this day, I am unable to watch news footage of another launch without getting a clenched throat and a knot in my stomach -- I'm always thinking, "Are they going to make it?"
Where were you when the shuttle exploded?