40 years later - Challenger explosion

[once_upon]

What were you doing? Did you watch it live?

 

[once_upon]

I was sitting on our family room sofa, feeding our 15 mo old baby. I didn't believe it until it was replayed several times.

Our 6 yr old was in kindergarten - I never asked him if they were watching.

I wonder what trauma the school age kids watching their teacher - from pride of their teacher to a violent death

 

[annie720]

I had gone to a mom’s support group with my 4-week-old colicky first child and heard the news when driving home. Couldn’t believe it was real. It was so tragic. I grew up in VA where many of our neighbors worked on the Mercury project, and my brother and I both worked at that same NASA facility while in college. We were very close to the manned space program. Along with 11/22/1963 and 9/11, this is a date I’ll always remember. Thank you for posting this. Incidentally, that first child is now a rocket scientist.

 

[Cachoo]

I was at work and we stopped and gathered in front of a tiny tv. The picture of the crew happily walking to the shuttle and "go with throttle up" are etched in memory.

 

[Kasey]

I was getting out of a class in basic training. They let us watch the news on tv. Was the only tv we got to see besides the Super Bowl.

 

[sk8pics]

I was in grad school and working in the lab. We all watched it in shock. The group had been involved in some projects with NASA and some materials had gone up in the space shuttle previously. It was so sad… I’m glad they investigated and did not cover up the root cause, which should not have been ignored as a possibility in the first place.

 

[Debbie S]

I was in 8th grade. I don't think anyone in the school watched it on TV (although I remember watching the landing of the first (?) space shuttle in elementary school), but i heard about it from a classmate. This girl had a habit of saying bizarre things that she'd misheard and turned out not to be true, so at first I didn't believe her but she said one of the teachers had told her. By the end of lunch, everyone was talking about it.

 

[Simone411]

I was at home watching on TV. I remember I was in disbelief, and I guess because it was so shocking. I then cried. I realized the loss all the families would experience and began praying for them. It was one of the saddest days for the nation.

I posted a link yesterday to an article about in the Astronomy thread I had started. Here's the link if anyone wishes to read my post.

Post in thread 'Astronomy, Earth, Moon, Mars & Beyond and Mysteries'

Jan 27, 2026

40 years later, a new look at lessons from the Challenger disaster

MSN

As high school teacher Christa McAuliffe prepared to be strapped into the space shuttle Challenger, Brian Russell, an official at the company that built the craft’s solid rocket boosters, had just participated in a fateful teleconference from his Utah headquarters.

Like every other engineer in the conference room at Morton...

• Simone411

• 

 

[Lynn226]

I was in English class and a student who was one year ahead of me popped in with seemingly sketchy information. She wasn't prone to misinformation, but our teacher dismissed it. After class, we ate lunch in a hurry and then went to the library to watch on tv.

 

[Wyliefan]

I had a good talk with my fifth grade teacher on Facebook today about this. We were in Tampa and he had taken the class outside to see the trail in the sky when the shuttle launched ... and then of course we were left in confusion. Even when we got back inside and had more information, we were all confused and some were joking and laughing. I think we were so young that we just didn't get it, but I expressed some remorse for that today, and he said he'd rather have had us laughing until we knew more and could talk with more certainty about it. Such a sweet guy. He was just in his first year of teaching then -- it must have been really hard for him to guide a classroom full of fifth graders through that.

 

[three fingered jack]

I was at work where we were allowed to listen to our radios as long as we used earpieces. One if my coworkers suddenly said, "the space shuttle blew up!". She sounded incredulous.
We had a t.v., in our office & all of us gathered around & watched, in disbelief, the sad, unfolding story.

 

[Orm Irian]

I was in Year 6 then. I think it must have happened late in the day here, or even overnight - not because I don't remember watching it happen in real time in class, because we didn't really do that sort of thing in my primary school, but because I do remember that when I went to school the next morning the first thing another kid said to me on the playground was a pretty typical Australian black-humour-type joke about it. Which I understood, meaning that I must have read about it in the paper, seen it on the evening news or heard about it on the wireless first thing in the morning. I'm pretty sure it was covered on a Behind The News episode shortly afterwards, too.

It was always a disorienting kind of experience to have big news events happening while the entire country was asleep back then. Even if it was on the radio in the morning it didn't feel quite real until you saw it on telly in the evening.