A moment in time that changed my childhood
The Challenger crew takes a break during countdown training at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 9, 1986. Credit: NASA
It was a cold January day, a school day starting like any other. In Mr. Van Delden’s fifth grade classroom in Glen Rock, New Jersey, my classmates and I were having trouble concentrating. I kept glancing at the clock on the wall, waiting for lunchtime.
We gathered with the other fifth grade class, sharing desks, eating and giggling, until we finally heard the noise we had been waiting for: The clunks and clangs of a rolling metal cart coming down the hall. Perched on the cart: a brown, square television. A lunch aide plugged it in, and turned a knob.
There it was, that majestic-looking space shuttle on its launchpad. We counted down and applauded as the shuttle lifted off.
The Space Shuttle Challenger spent just 73 seconds in flight, but it felt like far longer. I remember the giddiness, the anticipation, the wonder: a teacher in space, who was going to teach us, too. We had already planned the science experiments we were going to do alongside teacher Christa McAuliffe, then just 37. And my Hebrew School teachers had given me another reason to pay attention: McAuliffe’s fellow astronaut, Judith Resnik, was the first Jewish American and Jewish woman in space.
I felt pure excitement.
Then, suddenly, a bright orange flash and plume of smoke, with trails back toward earth.
The chatter stopped. I felt a deep foreboding as I tried to process what I saw. When a lunch aide’s scream pierced the silence, it registered.
“The Challenger blew up! The Challenger blew up!” she cried.
And a piece of my childhood shattered.
We spent a while that afternoon watching that explosion again and again, talking about Mrs. McAuliffe, her family, her students, and the lessons we would never get to learn. Mr. Van Delden tried to talk it through, to teach us, to help us understand.
I don’t remember a thing he said.
Every generation has that extraordinary moment in time where they can pinpoint where they were, what they were doing and how they felt. Mine was that January day, 40 years ago Wednesday, when astronauts McAuliffe, Resnik, Gregory Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Dick Scobee and Michael Smith died as they tried to reach for the stars.
In the months and years that followed, lessons were learned about solid rocket booster O-rings that failed to seal and warnings that unfortunately went unheeded and overruled.
I didn’t realize it in 1986, but that moment changed me. I became a bit less innocent and hopeful, and a bit more fearful. Even so, I’ve always clung to the belief that we must never stop trying to reach for the stars. The Challenger disaster came 19 years and a day after a cabin fire killed Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Just two and a half years later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Similarly, two and a half years after Challenger, NASA was back in space. Even after the 2003 Columbia disaster, space exploration continued.
So, right now, three individuals, including Christopher Williams, an American physicist who was just 2 years old when Challenger rose and fell, are living at the International Space Station, conducting experiments, living the dreams of those Challenger astronauts, and perhaps giving a new generation of young schoolchildren that same giddy sense of hope and wonder, without the lesson of learning to fear.
Columnist Randi F. Marshall’s opinions are her own.
Randi Marshall is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
