There are certain news items that are seared into our memories forever. One happened 37 years ago. I was at work at WTPR in Paris, Tennessee, when the Space Shuttle Challenger took off. Space shuttle launches had become somewhat routine at the time, and I hadn't made a point to watch the recent ones. This was different, because for the first time in NASA's history, a private citizen would be aboard, an elementary teacher named Christa McAuliffe. Also, because our news director Bart Herbison invited the staff to drop by the newsroom if we could to watch the launch on live TV. What we saw was devastating, never to be forgotten. Do you remember where you were and what you were doing that day?
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I was at work in a building with a large conference room and movie-sized projection TV system. The audio-visual team had put a news program on the screen, which showed the disaster over and over. The bright white exhaust from the two boosters against the clear blue sky was disturbingly beautiful. The contrast between disaster and beauty was overwhelming. I had to leave the room.
I was in my junior year of H.S. in my English class. Someone came in and told us what had happened.
I had just moved into a new apartment, and the cable guy was there to install our cable. When he got it connected and turned on the TV, this has just happened and it was on every channel. He stopped and we watched the coverage together for a while.
After he left, I recall calling every local news station and asking them to please stop repeating the tragedy in slow motion until we knew what had happened.
I was working on the shuttles for Rockwell, and had surgery that morning. I woke up to the TV on in recovery, and the explosion, repeated ad infinitum. Took two hours for the impact to set in and I cried all day.
I was on the air at WJYY-FM in Concord, NH... Christa McAuliffe's hometown. We had sent our news director, to Florida to report live on the launch. Then, it happened. Didn't believe something has gone wrong at first. then, it became obvious. We suspended regular programming for the next 24 hours, and took phone calls from listeners, Christa's friends and family members. I'll never forget that day
Oh Chuck, that must have been so hard.
I don't know exactly how many calls we handled, but it had to have been in the hundreds. Many people were distraught... some sobbing... some were angry... some just wanted to vent their frustrations, and yet we, as broadcast professionals, all had to hold it together and keep our emotions in check. It was not a pleasant time. It was not an easy time. But, it was an important time.
Chuck, thanks to all of you at WJYY for your humanity.
It was probably 29th Jan here, because it was after midnight. I was up feeding my baby son and had the TV on for company.
I was in college. I remember walking through the dorm's gathering area where the large TV was and seeing what Seplucci did--the vapor trail leading up into the sky and the explosion's cloud.
I was off to class but paused in shock. The handful of students in the room were in shock as well.
I was giving a biology lab tutorial to a dozen university students that morning. The university had set up a large TV in each lab so we could watch the launch. When the Challenger exploded, we all just sat in stunned silence. I'll never forget that morning... or when I watched real-time coverage of the second plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. Both events were equally surreal and seared into my memory!
I was in college taking a class on relativity, and that very morning we were discussing how close a rocket with matter/antimatter-powered propulsion could get to the speed of light. Of course when matter and antimatter collide, all of the matter is completely converted into pure energy.
That day we learned that you don't need anything like that to make a really destructive explosion.
Working at Boeing listening on the radio, so it took awhile to sink in unlike seeing the explosion on TV. What was more disturbing was reading years later that the people probably survived the explosion but ran out of air in the ocean.
"...reading years later that the people probably survived the explosion but ran out of air in the ocean."
I've seen enough episodes of 'Mythbusters' and their use of shock-watches to know that anything falling from that height and hitting something as unyielding as the ocean probably died immediately from the shock of the impact – if in fact the shockwave of the explosion of how many thousands of pounds of propellant in the main fuel tank hadn't killed them already.
-"BB"-
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