Twenty-four years. It doesn’t seem that long ago, and yet in other ways it does. I was a college junior at Penn State’s main campus and came back from a class for lunch when my roommate Paul told me the shuttle had blown up. I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. “You mean, like on the launch pad?” I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that the explosion had actually killed anyone.
(Side note: I had that exact same reaction when I watched, live on Good Morning America, the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. My first thought was, “Where did they find an empty passenger liner?” I simply could not believe that someone had flown a plane full of innocent people into a building and killed them all while I was watching.)
Paul said to me, “No, man. They’re all dead.”
I blew off the rest of the day and watched the news. I have been a fan of the space program all of my life. My earliest memory is of my father waking me up when I was about three-and-a-half years old to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I recall him saying, “This is something very important and I want you to see it even if you don’t understand it all,” or words to that effect. I remember Walter Cronkite explaining how the landing would occur with models of the command and lunar modules, which I thought were incredibly cool (and probably spurred my interest in model building when I was older).
I thought the Challenger disaster would be the end of the space program, or at least manned space flight. It wasn’t, and for that I’m grateful. But to this day I still get angry when I think about how easily avoidable this disaster was. Engineers knew the risks with the O-rings and cold weather and told their superiors about it … who did nothing. They turned a blind eye, ignoring the experts in the hope that they could get this launch off with a civilian schoolteacher on board without further delay. They thought a delay would be an embarrassment to NASA.The bureaucrats in charge put political expediency ahead of safety, and it bit them on the ass.
Unfortunately, seven brave men and women had to die for them to learn this lesson.
So think of the Challenger Seven as you go about your day, and remember that they did not have to die, and should not have died.
