25 or 8 years later: an aniversary reminiscence of 44 years of NASA disasters

For my mom it's the Kennedy assassination. She knows exactly what she was doing and where she was when it happened. She even more vividly remembers watching Lee Harvey Oswald being shot on live TV a few days later.

Before September 11, for me, the moment was January 28, 1986: I'm a freshman in college. I'm bored, I've been listening to the radio on which I've just heard the Talking Heads' "And She Was" before the announcer starts talking about the upcoming launch of the Space Shuttle. Being bored I decide I need to go off to the Campus Center and buy a paper to read. My choices would probably have been either The NY Times or The Village Voice. However between the time I flick the radio off, put on my coat and leave my suite everything changed. By the time I walked out into the hallway, a minute or so, everyone on my dorm floor was running around looking for who owned a TV.

We crowded into the one room with a tiny TV and watched as Dan Rather, the man who replaced Walter Cronkite, tried to fill that man's shoes. He was not successful. Playing around with a plastic model of the shuttle he was more of a hindrance to us getting the information we wanted than anything else. Still there it was, the shuttle with it's two smoke trails, one from a booster rocket careening off from main tank, blowing up with all it's crew on board. We were in shock.

Theoretically I knew that space travel was dangerous. I vaguely knew about Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 but had been two young when these events had happened to have them really register. Apollo 1 was the posthumously named Apollo mission that burned up on the launch pad 19 years and one day before the Challenger disaster, killing it's crew. I was a week shy of being 4 months old. Apollo 13 happened four years later in April of 1970. Being a three year old I watched Popeye cartoons and Captain Kangaroo instead. In 1986 I was an adult... well a late teenager who would about nine months later enter his twenties. It hit me like a lead weight to the solar plexus.

To come there would be investigations and Richard Feynman's star turn on the investigation committee where he would expose the rubber O rings and bureaucratic ineptitude as being the culprits behind the disaster. But the communal shock of that moment of national tragedy has stayed with me.

It was with me in February 2003, after a couple days of remembrances of the Challenger disaster. I was back in school, studying computer science this time and had taken a part time job as a supermarket cashier. I can still remember when a customer told me that the Space Shuttle Columbia had just been destroyed. I told him he'd mis-heard, that it was the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, that he couldn't be right. He insisted he was. After watching a few moments of CNN in the store's food court I took my lunch break in my car listening to the NPR coverage.

In the days that came it would seem to be eerily like a civil war reenactment gone wrong. One in which actual bullets have been loaded in with the gunpowder and the deaths are real. So was the realization that no one had learned any lessons from the last time. Which really should have come as no surprise since the same management problems had existed in the 67 launch pad fire. For a short time everyone's adrenaline was up and details were payed attention to. They landed a man on the moon. They did it a few more times and then inertia set in. The shuttle program itself was designed during this time of inertia that only got worse as time went on. For most of the decade following the Apollo 11 moon landing there would be less memorable missions in space. This is reflected in the concept of the shuttles themselves as 'space trucks'. The Apollo mission got it's public presence decreed by John F. Kennedy who made it a priority to land an American astronaut on the moon. A mission that was followed up by both Johnson and Nixon. The Shuttle program was announced to the nation by test launching the first one off of a converted Boeing 747 (there were two of these 747s used to transport the shuttles between alternate landing locations and Cape Canaveral in Florida.) At one point in time space travel seemed to be one of our greatest and strangest ambitions, an event experienced as a species. It had been turned into the mundane and commonplace in just a few years of it's greatest success. While everyone can tell you what the Apollo missions were about very few people remember or care why the space shuttles even flew.

Dan Rather reports for CBS New on January 28, 1986:



CNN coverage of Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003: