19 years ago today - the Challenger accident.

May They Rest in Peace:

Francis R. (Dick) Scobee
Michael J. Smith
Judith A. Resnik
Ronald E. McNair
Ellison S. Onizuka
Gregory B. Jarvis
Sharon Christa McAuliffe


NASA page with brief crew biographies.

President Regan's address to the nation.

Edit - SP

Lord guard and guide the men who fly,
Through the great spaces in the sky.
Be with them always in the air,
Through darkening storm and sunlight fair.
Hear us when we lift our prayer,
To all in peril in the air.

The Missing Man Formation

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

I really do remember it like it was yesterday. I can go to the room I was in when I heard the news. I can show you the spot where I was standing.

Until that day, I had always thought that the "remembering exactly what you were doing at the time" thing was untrue. Or at the very least, reserved only for the Kennedy assassination.

But I distinctly remembering being in a high school in New Orleans, taking a correspondants art course exam (I was out of school at the time as my Dad was temporarily assigned to the then new Jean Lafayette National Park), when in the next room I heard a teacher say in one of those raised, nervous voices, "The shuttle.... Everyone, the shuttle blew up!" Immediately I ran into the teacher's lounge and watched for fifteen minutes the coverage on the TV, bolted up on the wall.

I flunked that test, but I can still see it very clearly, and I can still hear that teacher's voice very clearly.

...John...

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"There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'."
-- Larry Niven

Sitting in a cafeteria in middle school being told by a friend, not believing it, then having a teacher's aide roll the TV in and put it on. They showed the replay of the liftoff, then the white cloud with the SRBs flying off and my stomach bottomed out.

I couldn't believe that after so many launches there were people watching who had no clue that wasn't normal.

Of course, now that we've passed this, the Columbia's anniversary is in a few days as well.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I don't remember where I was when 51-L happened, because I was only 13 months old at the time. But the whole remembering where you were thing is indeed true as it worked on 9/11. I first found out when I got home from school and my mum was cleaning my room. She was watching the news reports on the TV and told me, "The Twin Towers have collapsed." There was a bowl of water on the floor next to my bed and a piece of of tissue lying next to it. I remember not believing it at first, partly because BBC NEWS 24 was still showing pictures of the buildings on fire.

I have mixed emotions... I don't remember, that part of my memory isn't there for me any more. I can grieve, but I cannot remember. I'm sure it saves me from some awful memories, but at the same time I wonder what else is gone...

I was too young for Challenger too, but remember 9/11. I was playing the computer game Baldur's Gate while listening to Classic FM. The news came on, and they said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. I had a brief mental image of a Cessna wedging itself into someone's office and breaking a few windows, and I carried on with what I was doing. Then my mum told me about the second strike, we went and put the TV on, and it all happened in front of us.

I can remember the Bali nightclub bomb too. I had been to a big college disco the night before, and as soon as I woke up the next day I put the radio news on (as I always do), and this was the main item. It was very disturbing that hundreds of people had died while doing something that I had been doing at about the same time.

My sympathies to the Challenger and Columbia families, and indeed, to all the recently bereaved.

19 years ago I was sitting in the lobby at work talking to a salesman. The receptionist took a call, got a horrified look on her face, and said the shuttle exploded. It was pretty tough to work the rest of the day.

I listened to Country/Western radio at the time and they had been playing a song called "Burns like a rocket". It took them about three days to realize that wasn't such a good image any more.

I found out recently that Christa McAuliffe was born the same day I was.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

We just got back from a synthetic navigation exercise.

Most of the other courses were in the TV room, all talking about it. Some guys were airborne.


9/11 was a little different. Some people were awake here in Australia when it happened, but I was fast asleep.

I went to the Mess for breakfast and saw the TV on, with all these reports, Bush talking about retaliation. I didn't have a clue what was going on. I thought someone may have nuked a city.

Took about 10 mins of watching the TV before I actually found out what happened.

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

I was sitting in a pub on campus having my lunch, launch coverage was on the tv...the stunned silence afterwards...

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" The universe is running away
I heard it on the news just the other day
There's this new stuff called dark energy
We can't measure and we can't see..." - from Jimmy Buffett's What if the hokey pokey is all it really is about?

My son and I had run in a road race two days earlier. It was his first five-miler. I finished and went out to find him. He did pretty good for a 13 year old, about 38 minutes, especially in consideration of the roads being icy, and the snowy, cold weather.

Then it was time to drive home and watch the Patriots get blown out by the Bears. During the second quarter the inside of my left thigh started to tighten up, and the pain became tremendous. What had happened was I had cooled down after finishing the race, and then had sprinted out to accompany my son to the finish line. The muscles that had been overstressed then a few hours later proceeded to tear apart.

The next day things didn't improve, I could barely walk, and the pain wasn't lessening, so I made an appointment with my doctor. The earliest time they had was late morning the following day, January 28th.

The doctor recommended no use of the leg and R&R. The folks in the doctor's office seemed very quiet and glum. Since daytime TV is of no interest to me, I just listened to some CDs when I got back. Then my son got home from school and looked very distressed. When asked what was wrong, he replied, "Didn't you hear? The space shuttle blew up!", fighting back the tears.

On came CNN with their endless repeats of the horrors caught by the tracking camera and speculation as to what the cause was.

This was hard to take for us for a number of reasons. Of course the main thing was the loss of the crew. Then there was the loss of the vehicle and the impact of the disaster on the space program.

But also, that Saturday we had traveled to NYC to the old Hayden Planetarium. The IMAX movie we saw was "The Dream Is Alive". Five years earlier we had been at Cape Canaveral to see Columbia on the launching pad.

I still won't buy Morton salt.

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I was 14, I woke up at around 6am on what was going to be the first day of school for the year (my second year at High School)..started listening to the Radio, a station then called 3ZB (now called Newstalk ZB) and heard the DJ Barry Corbett (now a city counciller) say the words "death in space" as a news headline..and then all the details came pouring in from all media outlets. The actual event occured sometime after 3am NZ time, so most of us here were asleep. I was (and still are to some extent) a big space nut so it had me in a daze for the day.

For 9/11, the radio again played a big role for me. I had fallen asleep with it tuned to National Radio (think NPR for a US equiv.) and was half awake when I started hearing the announcer relating what had happened ending with the collapse of the towers..in my groggy state I thought they were refering to a movie plot or something. Heard the start of a News bulletin repeating the same details and jumped out of bed and turn the TV on..BBC World was endlessly repeating the same footage that we all know well now. Not alot of sleep was had that night.