Challenger Disaster, 25 Years Later

January 28, 2011 – 11:39 am

It was 25 years ago today, at 11:39am, January 28th, 1986. I was sitting in my dorm room, doing some school work, with the TV on, when the news broke. Let’s all remember

Save $10 on purchases of $49.99 & up on our Fruit Bouquets at 1800flowers.com. Promo Code: FRUIT49
If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds.

This entry was written by William Teach and posted on at 11:39 am and filed under New World Happenings. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed

2 Responses to “Challenger Disaster, 25 Years Later”

  1. Trish says:
    January 28, 2011 at 1:53 pm

    Was a very sad day. My kids had a snow day, and we were all at home watching TV when it happened. I remember having to console my eldest daughter (who was old enough to understand the tragedy) and feeling like there was no consolation!

    Too bad all of the hard work, incredible talent and tragedies like this one are in vain thanks to this administration’s efforts to put America in the back seat of aerospace. Literally there will soon come a time when we have to hitch rides with the soviets. What a travesty.

  2. gitarcarver says:
    January 28, 2011 at 6:47 pm

    At the time, I was working in Maryland while one of my best friends was working at KSC.

    I called him and he was definitely down.

    I remember thinking that the US would recover their dominance in space.

    And we did.

    The Challenger accident also showed a couple of other things. First, the veneration of Christa McAuliffe was frankly, irritating. Bridges, building, schools in the area were named after her while the remainder of the crew – Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnick – were basically afterthoughts.

    Secondly, we saw the influence of government control. In the aftermath of the accident, we saw agency after agency cover their butts rather than solving the problems.

    It wasn’t until an independent commission was set up that the truth of what had happened as well as the remedies were brought forth.

    You would think that we would have learned lessons from Challenger. We should have learned of the dangers of space flight. We should have learned the value of all the men and women that risk their lives in all jobs. We should have learned that openness yields better results.

    Instead, we saw more regulations (that made NASA worse.) We say money stripped away from the space program and thrown into social programs. After all, we all know that people aspire to be on welfare rather than being scientists and engineers.

    The space shuttle and the space program often inspired people to greatness. It produced research and products that people use to this very day.

    Because space flight is useful, because it inspired people, and because produced tangible benefits, it was shut down.

Pirate's Cove