After a year and some in SB, I had reluctantly decided that I needed more opportunities for advancement than were locally available. An ex-girlfriend that I still yearned for had moved to Silicon Valley, and I had gotten a job offer there. I had made plans and arranged logistics, and just the day before had given notice.

So when I was working at a favorite client and they mentioned “the terrible news”, I started to think of something humble to say about the firm providing continuity of service regardless…

…and was totally dumbfounded when she said the Challenger had blown up.

I was a space-happy kid. My dad had helped design part of one set of boosters (Titan?). I had astronomy stuff all over my room in my youth. I had believed the NASA hype that “The Shuttle” was just like an orbital bus. Everyone with enough pull got to ride, just for fun — John Glenn had even gone back up as some sort of publicity stunt.

Where I had lost interest in the Great Adventure of Space, because it had been turned into policies and procedures and costs and benefits, it suddenly became a cause that seven people — who surely knew the risks that the media had insulated us from — gambled and lost their lives to advance.

I’m not generally a religious person. My client was All Saints-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Montecito, California — and I thank them for the time I spent that day in their church, for it was sorely needed.

If you’re hit by a truck or fall off a ladder, prudence dictates that you make your way to a hospital. If your self-importance, your human empathy, your “sophisticated” ennui, your dreams, and your ego are simultaneously clobbered — you can do much worse than a small, quiet, Craftsman-style place of worship to mull things over until you feel presentable.

I was at Indiana University, at the end of class, Music Literature, I think. A woman we knew came in and told us that something had happened to the Shuttle. I remembered hearing about problems with the Shuttle’s main engine turbomachinery during development in the late 70s and my first thought was that an engine had let go.

I walked back to my apartment where my roommate had the TV on and saw the replays. I remember in the days that followed watching the front page of the NYTimes for hints as to what might’ve gone wrong, and the first grainy photos of that tell-tale black cloud of smoke at the aft field joint.

I remember Reagan’s speech that night, and the missing man T-38 fly-by at the funeral at Arlington (or was that in Houston….) In any case, I applied for an internship at NASA-Lewis (now NASA-Glenn) in Cleveland that summer. And my first job out of college was at KSC, working on Shuttle ground system software. I was there for STS-26, the return-to-flight mission of Discovery, in September of 1988.

There were a lot of tears that day, too.

That was the first real disaster that gripped the whole nation since probably JFK. Seems a little quaint after 9/11. Oh, the luxury of worrying about things like that!

“…and they slipped the surly bonds of earth, and touched the face of God.”

As we saw the explosion and realized what was happening, you could hear a pin drop…We all had tears in our eyes. Some of us said a prayer…others just stood in silence and disbelief.

The following days, the ominous lingering of the cloud that the explosion left behind sent chills down our spines.

God bless the crew and their families.

I can’t believe it’s been that long. I was in 8th grade, living in Texas, when I heard the news from some guys in the cafeteria. When they said the shuttle exploded, I didn’t believe them. I watched the video……

I wonder how many response we’d get here if the question was, “Where were you when JFK was shot?”

Rod on January 28, 2008 at 1:36 PM
Don’t remember (I was only two).

Some people posting here have parents who weren’t born yet at that time.

baldilocks on January 28, 2008 at 1:55 PM

My mom was maybe three when JFK was shot, and while she didn’t remember that event, she remembers the funeral (the whole family watched, she said it was a ‘Catholic’ thing). My mother fell in love with JFK Jr, and she mourned for days when he died a few years back. I find it amazing how we remember things like that, and they stay with us and affect us decades later.

They tracked the fall of the debris, live, for a bit until someone got their act together and cut from the live shot of the debris falling to a talking head who calmly and matter-of-factly stated that there was a “technical problem”. Then they went to commercial. I remember it like it was yesterday. Many of the employees cried and every one was depressed and sullen the remainder of the entire day.

RIP

When the Challenger exploded, I had just completed a Navy Servicewide exam in Newport and saw the replay of the explosion. Definitely not good days.

For Challenger, I’d just awakened from a very, very late night at the hospital with my wife and brand newborn son. My two year old (at the time) daughter had the TV on, and seemed to know what she was seeing wasn’t right -

On 9/11 I was in Salt Lake City to attend an Air Force conference – I’d just stepped out of the shower and saw the second plane hit live on NBC, after seeing the first confusing reports of the initial impact. I put on my flight suit, and headed down to the hotel lobby to meet the guys I was carpooling with – the desk clerk asked us “what’s happening?” – and I turned to her and said something along the lines of “someone is seriously asking for an ass whooping”. Her reply “well I hope they get it”

For Colombia – my now grown daughter and I had just gotten in the car to go to the business we were trying to make a go of. She turned the radio on in the car, and it was a newscast – although they didn’t mention accident or shuttle, within the first 10 syllables from the tone of the newscast, I said to her “something happened to the shuttle”. Unfortunately, I was right.

Rod on January 28, 2008 at 2:27 PM

LOL!

I lived in Long Beach from 1986-88, my first job after college. At the time, the I-5 was virtually open from San Clemente until you reached the Mission Beach area of San Diego. Quite the shock when I moved back to SOCAL in 2000!

Columbia: Outside in SoCal flying a radio control airplane. One of my friends drove up and told me what had happened. Also a very sad day.