I also grew up with the space program… thru the 70s and 80s.
I was on the base for three shuttle launches, and I currently work for the country’s largest space/defense contractor.

January 28, 1986. My 24th birthday.
One that will never be forgotten.

Challenger was devastating, but fully public. Quite unlike the incident at Chernobyl, which happened shortly after. That was hidden until it could no longer be denied. Those two incidents starkly illuminated the differences between the two superpowers.

JeffWeimer on January 28, 2009 at 10:20 PM

It also showed the differences between the leaders of the US and USSR.

And of course Reagan quoted the immortal poem High Flight in his speech, the night of the disaster.

Even in those days of the Cold War, it was the worst disaster (for lack of a better word) since the assassination of JFK. That’s not hyperbole. It was a “short, sharp shock”. NASA was still a matter of no inconsiderable pride – the shuttles were only flying for about five years at the time, and held all the hopes for our scientific future. The sad result of that disaster is that we stopped going beyond the shuttle for manned spaceflight, despite the tragedy and the engineering flaws (as the Columbia disaster reinforced). We ended up relying on the shuttle MORE after finding out it wasn’t the reliable “space truck” with which we previously comforted ourselves. We also relied more on unmanned missions to explore other planets instead of vigorously working manned missions. These were exciting, to a point (pathfinder), and helped develop our understanding outside the Earth, but they had the best thing going for them – no one would die if they failed.

Challenger was devastating, but fully public. Quite unlike the incident at Chernobyl, which happened shortly after. That was hidden until it could no longer be denied. Those two incidents starkly illuminated the differences between the two superpowers.

Prayers to the families.

Fair Winds and Following Seas, Shuttle Challenger Crew

factoid on January 28, 2009 at 4:02 PM

Yeah

Physics is a beyatch….sorry life isn’t the Jetsons, put the bong down!

factoid on January 28, 2009 at 4:02 PM

Yeah
Physics is a bitch, sorry life isn’t the Jetsons, best put the bong down!

Amid these last rites, a similar tragedy took the lives of two men in an oxygen-filled chamber at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. Airman 2/c William F. Bartley and Airman 3/c Richard G. Harmon were drawing blood samples from rabbits when a fire suddenly swept through the enclosure. The spacecraft and chamber tragedies pinpointed the dangers inherent in advanced space-simulation work.

Bartley and Harmon were altitude chamber technicians, AFSC 911X0. I joined the USAF in May 1967 and after training I was qualified as a Altitude Chamber Tech, Airman 3/c. The chamber career field was very, very small. Less that 500 people, officers and enlisted and that was at the height of the manning for the Vietnam War. I was initially supposed to be assigned to Brooks to take one of these two techs’ position.

In those days there was one class a year (at Brooks, BTW). While going through training they showed us the chamber where they had perished, still in use of course. It was a research chamber, huge by comparison to other chambers.

There was nothing apparent that the tragedy had occurred although I remember Ken Benefield, one of my best buds in the USAF in those early years said he could see scorch marks; I doubt he could.

The accident apparently happened when a light bulb blew and there was enough of a spark to start an O2 overpressured fuel fire. Just before I graduated my assignment was changed from a research chamber tech position to a pilot training chamber tech position at Moody AFB, GA.

I was glad. The research guys spent a lot of time with animals, especially monkeys and cleaning lots of monkey doo out of chambers.

I also met my future wife at Moody.

No real reason why I posted this. I just wanted to put their names into a thread. I never knew them but someone should remember their names.

I read this as a plea that you both quit carping about this. Your (plural) squabble over a trivial point sort of detracts from the gravity of the moment we are remembering. Not everything needs to – or should – be turned into a debate.

Just my two cents worth.

ProfessorMiao on January 28, 2009 at 12:39 PM

Thank you. My point.

We were all watching live in my 4th grade class when Challenger blew up. I remember thinking “Oh, no. They died.” I feel sorry now for my poor teacher trying to comfort all of us who were crying.

theotherKate on January 28, 2009 at 4:02 PM

Same here. Because a teacher was going to space, it was being watched in more classrooms than most launches. My teacher was the one who really broke down. I was in second grade, and I think it took a bit longer for it to sink in for us than slightly older kids. I can’t believe it’s been 23 years…

The ISS is what chopped liver, the unmanned efforts all over the solar system are childs play?
dmann on January 28, 2009 at 1:59 PM

Yeah.

I want to go into earth orbit for fun as a Saturday night program with the kids. I want affordable weekend getaways on the Moon. I want a permanent Mars colony. I want to be able to fly to Paris on a scheduled airline flight in under an hour, at a cost lower than or comparable to current airfares.

To me this would be the logical continuation of the arc of development from the Wright brothers to Neil Armstrong.

Instead we have a Mars rover whose major achievement is that it can scoop up some dirt and ride up and down the wall of a crater at the speed of geriatric snail. It’s nice to pull it off but hard to get excited about.

I went to McDonald’s, which was normally crowded and noisy during any other time. The crowd was there, but on this day there were only murmurs. I sat next to an elderly black man who did nothing but shake his head and say “God bless them” over and over again.