Challenger
I was the same age as my daughter is now when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida, United States, on the 26th January, 1986 at 11:39 a.m. EST (16:39 GMT).
On that fateful day, optometrist Jack Moss raised his new Betamax video camera to the sky over central Florida. The subsequent recording was turned over to an educational organisation a week before his death in December 2009. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the previously unseen footage into the public domain.
I remember going into school the next day carrying my Space Shuttle book and was completely distraught that nobody was as upset as I was. I simply couldn’t understand it. I recall telling my class teacher that Christa McAuliffe was a teacher too but she shooed me away saying “it’s nothing to do with us, we’re not Americans”. I was absolutely disgusted. To me the crew of Challenger STS-51-L were not only American heroes but women and men who died in a valiant attempt to expand human knowledge. As such the disaster had everything to do with everyone, American or otherwise.
STS-51-L crew: (front row) Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair; (back row) Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik.
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