Friday, January 28, 2011

It's been 25 years... where has the time gone?

It seems to me that this day is the Kennedy Assassination of my generation.

Where were you, when you heard that the Challenger blew up? For me, I had just gotten into my first class of the day at high school, English. My teacher told a completely incredulous classroom that the Challenger had blown up. We thought he was making a bad joke. Until he reiterated it, that he had seen the news before coming to school that day, 25 years ago, today.

I remember going home and gluing myself to the TV, switching through the different coverage, looking for news. It was my first real exposure to a shock such as that, at an age when I was able to start to comprehend the horrific nature of 7 people being blown into a fireball.

Today, the shuttle is on its last legs. Only a few more flights into orbit and NASA hangs up the whole programme, with no replacement in the wings. Sad, really.

Here's a photo piece on the Challenger, with a focus on the teacher in space, who didn't quite make it there, Christa McAuliffe. It truly puts a human face on the events of that day.

3 comments:

loribeth said...

I was newly married & unemployed, in our tiny one-bedroom apartment in midtown Toronto, doing the ironing in the living room in front of the TV set. It was an awful day. :(

Ya Chun said...

i was in my 'enrichment' class in the library in my elementary school - and my classmate, Jen, who wanted to be an astronaut, watched it over and over and over. I even went to the librarian because i thought she a was a bit obsessed!

The things we can do - and do well *most* of the time - are scary - when they aren't done well *all* of the time.

heidi said...

I was home sick from school in the 3rd grade. I remember watching and my mother crying and having no clue what was going on. It took my mother awhile to stop sobbing long enough to explain it.