Challenger Video

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Alaska

I was student-body president at my high school when this happened. My only worthwhile act in that office was to walk to the principal while people were still transfixed by the explosion and ask him to put the flag at half-staff, which he did.

This entry was posted in Life in the Atomic Age. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Challenger Video

DirtCrashr says:

February 8, 2010 at 5:14 pm

I was working in fund-raising at Stanford, my first “real” money-paying job after a series of amiable failures in Theatre, five years out of UCSC…
D.W. says:

February 8, 2010 at 5:43 pm

I was an eighth grader at DeLaura Junior High in Satellite Beach, about 15 miles south of the Cape as the crow flies. The school district would always allow students to stand outside the classrooms to watch launches, and they would pipe the NASA audio through the PA system. We all saw the explosion and the debris falling, and knew what had happened. I can still see the faces of those astronauts as they walked out to the transfer vehicle that morning, smiling, confident, brave. They definitely had the right stuff.
Kyle says:

February 9, 2010 at 1:07 pm

I was in the fourth grade. The most interesting phenomenon I observed was the speed at which the “What does ‘NASA’ stand for?” joke appeared in every school in the country.

But what made it even more memorable was that my dad’s stomach exploded on the same morning. He had trouble getting out of bed and was experiencing a lot of abdominal pain, so my mom drove him to the emergency room. He had developed an ulcer over some time – hooray for stress – and it burst overnight.