… the space shuttle Challenger exploded. I was sitting in history class, when all of a sudden the PA system came alive as someone in the main office put the microphone up to the TV speaker, and we heard that the Challenger has apparently exploded. About four of us looked up at the teacher, who gave us the tiniest nod, and we dashed out of the room to the library, the nearest place with a TV.
That day *sucked.*
In many ways, that marked The End Of The Dream. Prior to Challenger, the Shuttle system was not living up to its promise of cheap and fast space transport. But we could at least entertain the hope that it *could.* After Challenger, it was clear that NASA would never even try to make spaceflight anything other than a boutique industry for the extremely few, and would probably never try anything more daring than low Earth orbit milk runs.
3 Responses to “A Quarter Century Ago…”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Weren’t you reading things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Justice by then?
Hell, I wasn’t reading it *by* *now.* However, when the used copy I just bought online gets here, I’ll read it.
I missed “High Justice,” too.
The day the shuttle blew up, I got a phone call at my office from Kenneth S. Rankin, a good friend and a good teacher. We were looking at the same images before the launch. We decided that something would freeze (if it hadn’t already frozen by 8 AM) and that the whole thing would explode. Of all the guesses we made about the future, that was the only one we weren’t happy to get right.