73 seconds in too the launch, all seven died

I was in middle school and was home sick. I watched it live on TV.

A part of me died that day.

Mike Mulvane discusses it in detail from an astronauts point of view in his book "Riding Rockets"

I was a freshman in High School and we were home for a snow day. I had come in from shoveling and was watching it live on TV. I still watch Reagan’s address to the nation several times a year. One of his best speeches in my opinion.

I was at my bosses house getting ready to carpool with him to work in his '64 Corvette. We watched it just before leaving and I had a pit in my stomach all day.

They've got a small but nice museum for Onizuka at the Kona International Airport. I go there every chance I get.

I was watching TV in the common area of Washington Hall at Ohio University. The room went silent.

I was at work and one of the women in the group, who was well known for being high-strung and prone to misinterpreting things she hears and to exaggeration, came running through the area yelling "THE SPACE SHUTTLE BLEW UP!!" I figured "Nah, that wouldn't happen. They must have aborted the launch for some technical reason and she freaked out about it." I didn't find out the truth until I saw it on the news that night.

Same thing happened when Mount St. Helens blew up in 1980. I lived 70 miles away from it and I didn't even know about it until I saw it on the news 12 hours later.

I was a senior in high school. That day I was tutoring a couple of sophomores in math when the principal came on the school wide intercom sobbing. It was a while before she could speak and all we heard was the crying. Based on her reaction, my first thought was that she was going to tell us that we were facing an incoming nuclear strike. When she finally told us it was the Challenger explosion, I was relieved and felt she was being overly emotional. It really diminished what was terrible tragedy.

Many of us in this thread are close in age. I was a sophomore in high school and had just returned from lunch to my geometry class. The news of the event was playing on the TV in the room. Sad day for sure.

My wife and I were in s Florida driving ne on hwy 78 from Moore Haven to Lakeport. Saw the smoke trails but had no idea what we were seeing until we got to the Hideaway restaurant and saw the news.

I was a whopping 26 days old, obviously learned about it much later in life.

Netflix has a good miniseries/documentary on the events leading up to it.

I was onboard USS MT WHITNEY with COMSECONDFLT. We were in an exercise. The Chief of Staff (COS) came into Intel Plot and said that the Challenger blew up. Exercise cancelled.

quote:

Originally posted by P250UA5:
Netflix has a good miniseries/documentary on the events leading up to it.

Another vouch for the Netflix documentary. Well done.

On the ESPN ap, there's an article about the soccer ball (Onisuka's girls' soccer team ball was meant to go to space). The soccer ball survived the explosion and later went into space on an ISS mission.

I was in the 8th grade and watched it live in science class.

I was working in a photography studio in Canton, Ohio. We were doing all the attorneys in Stark County, and the first one after my lunch break told me about it.

Over the years I’ve been told that 5 to 6 events over the course of your life will be indelibly etched in your brain. This is one of them along with Kennedy’s murder and a few others.

I was in an accounting class at Boston University. At the time BU had a bus that went up and down Commonwealth Ave everyone called the BU shuttle or just "the shuttle." A guy came in to class late and sat down next to me and told me "the shuttle exploded" and said something like "how could the BU shuttle have exploded?" and he said "no, the Space Shuttle." After class I went back to my room and watched the news coverage on a very small black and white TV I had at the time.

I was at the Jacksonville MEPS swearing into the Delayed Enlistment Program for my eventual entry into the USAF 4 months later. I was sitting in a holding area waiting to raise my hand when all of a sudden, all the military career advisors came rushing out of their offices and poured into the visitor area where there was a TV. Then someone came out and told us what had happened.

I grew up in the Daytona Beach area. My Dad was an elementary school principal and since there was a teacher on board for that mission, school children across the country were watching either on TV or from the beaches (you could see launches from New Smyrna Beach all the way up to Ormond Beach). What a horrific tragedy to witness, especially for all those children. For everyone...

At the time I was working in a photography shop so I saw hundreds of pictures of it customers had taken from the beach, or their backyards, or some who had traveled to Cape Canaveral to watch. One of my customers even gave me a copy of his pictures, which I should still have packed up someplace.

Every year I reflect on both events with mixed feelings; the day I first raised my hand to enlist, and the day we lost 7 brave American astronauts.

I was at a meeting at our parent company in Houston, not far from the Johnson Space Center. I remember the buzz through the whole building as the news flashed across the TV screens.

I was sitting in our dispatch office when we received a message from the Feds about the explosion and directing us to seize any parts of the shuttle that could be found.
I still have the printout of the message.

I was a jr in high school, and saw it on a tv in our computer lab. It wasn't live, but I was one of the first 12 people in my school to know about it.

Then, and now, I do not consider it (or Columbia's loss in 2002) to be a 'disaster.' Gus Grissom said that space travel is a deadly business, and we must accept it. It appalled me that we grounded ourselves for 2.5 yrs aftsrwards.

Now, of course for the families and loved ones, it was a disaster. But, for me, if we cannot accept death as tbe price of admittance to space, we should just give up and stay on Earth. . .