Recently released is a home movie taken some 70 miles from the launch site.
Optometrist Dr. Jack Moss, however, was playing with his new Betamax camcorder that chilly January morning, and recorded the sad event from his front yard in Winter Haven, Florida, about 70 miles southwest of Cape Canaveral.
Moss had never shared the tape with the media or NASA, but a week before he died this past December, he fished it out of his attic and handed it over to the Space Exploration Archive, a non-profit organization in Louisville, Kentucky. The Archive transferred the video to digital formats and released it to the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the disaster this past week.
The distance gives it a perspective I’ve not seen before.
For those of you younguns to young to remember Challenger, it was… a hell of a thing. The Shuttle program was still young enough, and the whole Teacher In Space interesting enough, that many schoolkids across the nation were plopped in front of TVs to watch it. I, however, was not one of those… I was in history class. But when it happened, someone in the main office has the presence of mind to turn the PA system on and put the mike next to a TV. When we heard “the Shuttle has exploded,” the history teacher made no effort to stop three or four of us who bolted out the door, heading to the library (the one place where we knew there was a TV). As memory serves, I managed to maintain composure until I got home that afternoon, whereupon all pretence of emotional control failed me utterly.
History occasionally tosses those “You’ll always remember where you were when…” events at you. For me there are three… Challenger, Columbia, 9/11. Earlier generations had MLK/JFK/RFK assassinations, Pearl Harbor, the Moon landing, Hindenburg, VE and VJ Days. Seems like the majority of such events are Bad News, or, at best, the End Of Bad News. Few enough are Amazingly Good Events.
