It's not post #300, but I'll get over it.
There are a lot of people (including me) who can describe exactly where they were on September 11, 2001. We track our lives, it seems, by our national tragedies.On January 28, 1986, I was watching television with my classmates. I was eight, and halfway through my first year at a new school.
More than anything in the world, I wanted to go to space camp, because I hadn’t yet seen Top Gun and decided to be a fighter pilot.
It was Tuesday morning.
And we all sat there together and saw the Challenger launch, and then we saw it explode.
posted by Elizabeth @ 1:36 PM
5 Comments:
I was in the eighth grade, and had pretty much decided that I was going to be a mission payload specialist one of these days -- probably for some experiment having to do with cosmic rays, or something else astrophysical. I wasn't watching; I was upstairs in history class. Some kid came to the door and shouted that it had exploded, whereupon I ran out of class, down to the library, and watched the replay in horror.
Talk about your counterfactuals. Were it not for that disaster we'd most likely have a manned Moon base up and running by now, and at least a couple of manned expeditions to Mars underway. Now I wonder if we're ever going to get off of this rock.
I'm not sure I ever got as far as imagining *being* an astronaut. I was afraid of heights, so it seemed like a longshot. After we watched the launch, I never really thought about the possibility again.
Instead, I obsessed about the hearings in the news and things like stamps with the Challenger on them. So it stuck with me for a long time.
I do remember people reacting the same way to the Challenger disaster as they did to 9-11. As if everything had changed, as if the laws of physics suddenly applied to us in a way that they hadn't in the twenty years before the it happened. There wasn't nearly the same response to the Columbia, but my parents have talked about the reaction to the Apollo fire and it sounds similar.
It seems to me that there must be some generational requirement to these things; then again, maybe it's a question of sheer number--two disasters, and it's world-shaking, three, and it's a pattern that we all need to get used to.
I think I'm the only person whose elementary school class was not tracking the shuttle expedition. I remember watching the news before I headed to school and walking into the classroom to announce to my fifth-grade teacher that the space shuttle had exploded. "Is this some kind of horrible joke?" she asked me. "No," I said, and wandered to my desk in the empty classroom. Strange--even though I was 10 years old, it took me a few days to realize the significance of what had happened, since the launch was the first time I'd heard of the Challenger expedition.
Huh. Guess I thought everyone was affected. Now I'm going to have to rethink my hypothesis. And reconsider just *how* big a geek I was as a child.
Or, some of us were on the other side of the world and, being of an age not allowed to stay up to watch TV that late (12 hours' difference between US EST and Thailand), had been promised by Father that they could watch the taped version the next morning.
I still remember my parents trying to explain why the taped version was probably not a good thing to watch. Being a kid with a short attention span, I soon forgot about it and didn't know about the effect of the disaster on space exploration until I was all grown-up.
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