36 years ago this morning

I was out of school for snow. I walked over to my great aunt's house, and she told me. I assumed she was confused because she was an old lady, and then I turned on the TV.

 

Same — senior year and it was Regents week for NY high schools. I didn’t have any tests that day, I was home and being lazy.

 

I was 15 -- a sophomore in high school. I had my English midterm that morning and was done for the rest of the day. Came home, put on the TV and remembered there was a launch and that was they day they were launching a teacher into space. So I saw it live. Not something I'll ever forget. Today I live in Christa McAuliffe's hometown (she grew up in Mass.) and my house is right around the corner from the Christa McAuliffe Branch of the public library.

 

Holly was still there. Must see TV.

 

In college, my conundrum was always "Price is Right" or 8 am lecture hall? Hmmm? The showgirls (Diane Parkinson, et al) may have had something to do with the choice.....

 

I was in first grade in computer class (Commodore 64 ftw). It was on the TV.

 

I had just started a new job as sports editor at a 6-day daily located 50 miles from my hometown, so I was making the round trip commute every night (and arriving home at 2-230 am) back to my parents' house, until I could rent an apartment on my big bucks paycheck of $6.00 an hour.

My dad was still working his job as wire editor of the Starrville Daily Screech, where he'd worked for 33 years. They'd shifted to AM publication a couple years earlier, so he was on a 5 pm-1 am schedule just like me, so we had gotten into a routine of getting up at about 10 am, then coming down for coffee and breakfast/brunch. So it wasn't unusual when I shuffled down to the table about noon to join my parents watching the cable news.

I had been a big space geek all through my childhood in the Sixties; I watched all the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launches, built the plastic models, built and launched the flying rockets myself, launched camera rockets, learned how to calculate stability and determine altitude by trigonometry, etc etc.

For the Apollo launches in my middle school years, the teachers brought TV sets into the classrooms and let us watch the coverage live, and assigned me as the classroom "expert commentator" to provide explanations and analysis.

Anyway, fast forward to 1986, and space launches were no longer a big deal, the world didn't come to a halt for launches anymore. And I wasn't quite the expert I had been years earlier, although I did keep up with most of the major news.

But I was able to prevail on my parents to watch the Challenger launch live on CNN, the only outlet covering it in real time. So we were sitting there drinking coffee, watching the liftoff. Mom and dad were leafing through the morning papers.

In the teevee movie version, of course, I'd drop my coffee cup straight on the floor in a shower of breaking porcelain and spattering coffee.

In real life, I set the cup down roughly on the table, spilling maybe half the coffee, startling my parents out of their semi-oblivious haze, along with my loud exclamation, "holy shit!!," which they thought was a little strong for early afternoon.

So they said, "holy shit what?" And I said, "holy shit, as in, the astronauts are dead."

At that moment on teevee, the commentators still didn't know anything, they were going on and on about possible escape scenarios, return to launch site aborts, speculating about seeing rescue parachutes, all that.

But I knew enough with my semi expert knowledge of the design of the shuttle to know there was virtually no means of escape if anything at all went wrong between SRB ignition on the pad and SRB jettison about two minutes after launch.

Mercury and Apollo had had escape rocket systems which might have been able to pull astronauts free of an exploding booster, but the shuttle had no such system.

My parents couldn't really believe it. "Come on, they must have some kind of escape procedures."

Of course there had never been a shuttle disaster before, so nobody really knew what was happening, but I said "whatever abort plans they have are dependent on the orbiter remaining in one piece. So after we saw the initial explosion cloud/fireball, if we didn't see the orbiter vehicle coming out of that intact in the next couple of seconds trying to glide back home, the crew was finished."

(The first two shuttle launches had ejection seats, as had Gemini back in the sixties, but those would only have been useful the first 30 seconds or so, because ejecting at supersonic speeds is usually fatal.)

So I told my dad, "you better call the office. This is gonna be one of the major news events of the decade. A1 just got ripped up," which he did, and promptly got called in to the office four hours early to work on extra pages. He threw on some office clothes and went out the door.

I called my Podunk 6-day daily too, and got ahold of the ME; he hadn't seen the news yet, but he agreed we needed to rip up our front page too. (We did cover national and world news when it was really big stuff, as I assured him this would be.)

As the only person on the 8-person staff with much of any space knowledge, I was immediately designated the point person in organizing our coverage. So I got called in a few hours early too.

 

No memory of this because I was 2, but I'm always struck with the fact elementary schools across the country were playing this for their students. I can't imagine being one of those teachers knowing the class of children just watched seven people die and having to explain that they all just saw seven people die. I can't imagine being one of Christa McAuliffe's students or one of her colleagues who had to watch that.

 

NASA whisked her parents and the other astronauts' families away immediately after the implosion. They waited to meet with then-Vice President George Bush. It happened so quickly, and all of us at the media site were so horrified and shocked, that we didn't have anyone to quote -- mostly got NASA PR updates (very little information at the time, mind you) -- until Reagan's speech.

It was the biggest story of my life, and unfortunately the beginning of the end of my radio career. I was scheduled to be CBS Radio's space reporter once the Shuttle began flying "routine" missions. That's why I took the job one month previous.

They never flew another "routine" one again, and I left WMEL in fall of 1987, having not seen a successful Shuttle launch from the Cape. I was working for Total Sports in Raleigh when Columbia broke up over Texas.

 

I was at work. Someone had pulled the little TV from the break room out and turned it on to watch Christa and the crew take off. I was in Houston, so there was a good bit of interest. I didn't have Starman's level of expertise, but when it blew I knew enough to know they were done. The only question was whether the astronauts were killed by the explosion or if some of them survived until impact. Totally surreal moment. Such a tragedy.

 

My oldest started an aerospace job at Cape Canaveral in Nov. so we went down to spend Christmas with him this year. Went to the Kennedy Space Center and saw one of the Space Shuttles (Discovery?) and it was awesome to see in total, up close and personal. There was no separate escape pod available. Kennedy is a little unknown gem of a visit, especially if you're a space nerd.