There are certain events in every one’s lives when some history-changing event happens and the memory of that event stays with you the rest of your life. For example, those older than me can vividly recall exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when President Kennedy was assassinated.
One of those moments in my own life was the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
The Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off on January 28, 1986.
I was in the US Air Force and was going to Communications Intelligence Technical School at Goodfellow, AFB in San Angelo, TX. I was just coming out of the dining hall when someone came running up and said that the Space Shuttle had just “blown up”. I went back to our dorm where friends and I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the non-stop news coverage on TV. Our Afternoon schedule of classes were cancelled.
I remember that, at the time, initial speculation on the cause of the disaster pretty much ran the spectrum of possible causes. Some “experts” said a bomb had destroyed the shuttle, others said a missile had brought it down, and other people, in that we were still in the Cold War Era, speculated that the Russians were responsible. Others speculated that lightning or birds brought down the shuttle, or that it was a case of human error on the part of the crew.
As we now know, it was a piece of rubber, called an O-RING, that brought down the shuttle and not something more sinister.
Seven brave Astronauts, including Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, were killed in the disaster.
While addressing the nation on Live TV the night of the disaster, President Ronald Reagan ended his comments with a line from a poem, “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, JR. To this day, I have always felt that this was one of the most stirring and appropriate lines that a President has read while addressing a grieving nation.
We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God
