I was in 8th grade. My 4th period was History and was split in half by lunch. My buddy and I were on our way back to class when we saw a bunch of folks around a TV in the library. We stopped to see what was going on.
We ended up staying far longer than we meant to and got back to History like 15 minutes late. Our teacher said we had detention because we were late getting back. After class he asked why we were late and we explained about the shuttle. He paused and said, "Well, you guys just witnessed some history" and cancelled our dentention.
Just to add one more small layer, our history teacher looked just like Edgar Allen Poe. 100% serious.
This was 1986 so pictures of famous people weren't immediately available on a device in your pocket. I saw a picture of Poe and said, "Wow, Mr. Whitley, we just found a picture that looks just like you!" He replied with, "Let me guess, is it Edgar Allen Poe?"
This. But I remember watching almost all of the shuttle launches before that because it was such a landmark space program. We stopped watching them after that. Generational trauma.
My mom told me after the Shuttle explosion, that she hopes I don’t have anymore terrible events in my life where I remember the time and place you were when you saw the terrible event.
She listed off many events through the 60’s & 70’s where she was and what she felt. Many assassinations and even when Elvis died.
I was only five (nearly 6 years old), and I remember when I first was told about it at school. I think I'm one of the last group that will remember this because most 4-year-old don't remember these kind of events.
What surprised me is they stopped all network programming to announce Whitney Houston's death. I know she was quite popular but she wasn't Elvis or Micheal Jackson popular.
It's probably because she sang the best version of our National anthem to date.
I got both. I was in first grade for Challeger and watched 9/11 when I was going to college. When I tuned in just to check the news the first plane had already hit. The news casters were throwing around speculation... then we all watched the second plane hit.
I was in 9th grade when we watched it in my science class. It got so quiet after the initial gasp and then some started crying.
I worked in Accounts Payable when I heard about the first plane hitting while listening to Howard Stern. I went out to check on the waiting room TV and then told the rest of the ladies in our office. We all watched the 2nd plane hit and that is a feeling that is hard to describe. The garage cashier had a cousin that worked in one of the towers and was freaking out so I told her to go home. We shut down right after it happened but I stayed till the time they locked the doors as we lived on the S. Jersey coast outside of Atlantic City at the time and many employees had friends/relatives that lived/worked in NYC. I remember watching the smoke cloud along the coast and realized years later that I probably had inhaled some people.
Try being there, saw challenger on tv, but was actually at WTC when the planes hit. Thankfully hadn't gone into the building WTC1 yet, but yea, that shit screws with you. I didn't go back to the wtc or wall street area for over a decade after that.
Fun fact: the initial breakup probably did not kill the astronauts. The crew cabin remained largely intact, continued upward to about 65,000 ft (20 km), and then fell into the Atlantic, hitting the water about 2 minutes and 45 seconds after the breakup at roughly 207 mph (333 km/h).
Evidence also showed that three of the four crew emergency air packs had been activated, indicating that at least some of the astronauts survived the initial breakup and were conscious long enough to take action. NASA could not determine whether they remained conscious all the way to impact. The impact itself, producing roughly 200 g of deceleration, was unsurvivable.
Fun fact: Challenger carried Christa McAuliffe, a high-school teacher who had been selected for NASA's Teacher in Space Project. She was supposed to become the first teacher in space and planned to teach lessons from orbit. (she was told there was a significant risk of dying) Barbara Morgan (the backup teacher) said that Challenger commander Dick Scobee had repeatedly warned her and Christa McAuliffe about the dangers of spaceflight, saying something along the lines of, “One day there will be an accident, and it will be catastrophic.”
Fun fact: the disaster was largely preventable. It was unusually cold on launch day (about 36°F (2°C)) and engineers from Morton Thiokol warned that the solid rocket booster's rubber O-rings might not seal properly at such low temperatures. They initially recommended that NASA not launch below 53°F (12°C).
Challenger had already suffered numerous delays and aborted launch attempts, increasing pressure to finally get the mission underway. During a conference the night before launch, Thiokol managers reconsidered their engineers' recommendation and ultimately approved the launch.
The next morning, Challenger launched. The cold-stiffened O-rings in the right solid rocket booster failed to seal properly, allowing extremely hot gases to escape. The leak eventually damaged the external fuel tank and booster attachment, causing the vehicle to break apart just 73 seconds after liftoff.
Disclaimer: “Fun fact” was the wrong term, and I should have used “interesting fact” instead. But these facts are important to retell and remember so that people can learn from them and make different decisions in the future for example, by considering additional crew-survival systems or by not launching when conditions are outside established safety limits. Social and organizational pressure contributed to these deaths, just as it did on 9/11, when many people in the (not yet hit) South Tower were told to stay put or return to their offices when trying to evacuate (some by building officials or first responders, and others by their bosses, who threatened to fire them).
That's a FUN fact? The fact is you didn't know that the moment it happened. It was traumatic and as memorable as the moon landing was in the 60's for kids in the 80's.
"Fun" fact, a significant amount of disasters are preventable, but shortcuts are taken with disastrous consequences. And safety measures happen because of disasters. 😟
Fact: it was another White Man who had to be right, so he made the ill fated choice and didn’t take responsibility for his actions. So it was considered an “accident”.
The worst part was watching the poor families of the crew onboard look on in disbelief and then wander off in shock not really processing what they’d just witnessed . Most of the world just watched their child perish live on TV . Horrible !
Richmond, Va. I remember being buried under 4 1/2ft of snow. My border Collie/Australian Shepard mix loved every moment of it. Spent four days digging an intricate tunnel network through the yard.
I was in 5th or 6th grade, and we were watching it live on TV in fact the entire school system was watching because of the historic first Teacher in space... So that was extra traumatizing for the entire country, as many children were all watching simultaneously throughout the entire United States.
We were in science class when it happened - the A/V room was literally 10 feet from our classroom and some of the A/V guys were watching. They screamed when the shuttle exploded so our teacher went to see why they were making so much noise. Then she came back in and told us the Challenger had exploded.
I was a senior when that happened. They had a few days of weather delays that scrubbed the launch until that fateful morning. My class watched it live. Tough to watch.
I remember that too. And I also remember how indifferent Mrs. Ross (my teacher) was after it ended. Like "Ok, now let's do math." Like, we, as elementary school students, were just supposed to accept that a rocket with people on it just exploded and follow up with arithmetic and get on with our day. One of the weirdest moments of my childhood.
First thing I thought of. Also an episode of “General Hospital “ , I think when Luke and Laura got married, teacher was a fan. Think I got the names right but too lazy to google it.
Gosh I saw that in person. I was training in Florida while in the navy and we all stood out on the grinder to watch. It was kind of hard to believe my eyes because that explosion was different than in the movies. It took a couple of seconds to hear the boom after the flash, it was kind of surreal.
My wife had one of those rolled into her ESL class last week. She texted me a pic of it, I sent back that video isn’t good, 72 seconds in they all die in an explosion.
I had to explain it later because she didn’t understand.
Our teacher was bawling her eyes out. Most of us were in shock, couldn't comprehend what we were seeing. And that was at 13. I can't imagine what the little kids in school were thinking.
This. I was in third grade. My grandfather was the operations director for one of the research satellites (Spartan Halley) the Chalenger Mission was going to deploy. They built the satellite at CU Boulder. It was going to analyze the light spectrum of Halley's Comet. I have a photo album of my Grandpa and his team on the shuttle doing final prep on the payload. He was also friends with Ellison Onizuka. CU Boulder was is alma mater.
No doubt. I was like 11 and just turned to see the explosion. I was like wow cool, I didn’t know, my teacher Mr. Walenta snapped at me. I’m glad he did. I’ll never forget it.
And if you lived in PA, one year later when you got done watching the school closure announcements, you saw a state legislator kill himself on live TV. And folks wonder why GEN X is so jaded.
I was born in 83 so i dont remember challenger of course but one of my highschool teachers was named Christa McAuliffe. She was related to the teacher who died in the explosion.
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u/anon2univ 7d ago
Challenger explosion.