Twenty years today since the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Is there another particular cloud formation -- aside from perhaps any given mushroom cloud -- that resonates so horribly as this one?
I’m hardly the first to note that this event is the single defining moment for Generation X: “The world stopped when the Challenger exploded,” says Bryant Adkins at In the 80s (though this appears in an essay that requests we not call him an Xer but a “child of the 80s” -- as if that would change anything that we all are). Everything2.com has a section called Where we you when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded? -- and while the anecdotes are all spectacularly banal (“I was out shoveling the driveway, and when I came back in, Mom tells me, ‘Something happened to the space shuttle’”), I find myself nodding and recognizing myself in them.
My story: I was a junior in high school, but for some reason school was closed for the day so I was home. I watched the launch and then either turned the TV off immediately after the blast-off or the network cut away before that fateful throttle up, and when I came back a little bit later to watch a movie (geez, and I remember this, too: it was a Marx Brothers movie I’d borrowed from the library), I learned what happened and was riveted to the tube for the rest of the day.
The two overarching memories of that day for me were 1) the feeling that it was weird and wrong for everything else to just continue on as normal -- like, I had a regular babysitting job and was stunned when the people I worked for neede me as usual that afternoon. I couldn’t believe people could just act like nothing had happened. And 2) the slim hope I clung to all that day that someone might have survived, that one astronaut might miraculously be plucked from the ocean off Florida. I kinda don’t get how it has become one of the myths surrounding the destruction of Challenger that the astronauts died instantly, cuz I do remember that on that very day there was talk of the crew compartment surviving the breakup of the ship, and how horrible it must have been for the astronauts to be conscious and aware for three long minutes as they fell to the earth that they were going to die. That still haunts me.
The other thing that haunts me: when I watch shuttle launches now, when I hear the guy or gal at Mission Control say, “Go at throttle up,” I wince a little. I know they’ve fixed the Challenger problem and that whatever’s gonna go wrong with the next shuttle will be something we didn’t anticipate, or should have anticipated but didn’t, but I can’t help it. I’ve got a lifelong Challenger hangover -- when Columbia burned up in the atmosphere three years ago next week, I felt the same kind of kick in the gut as I did in 1986. And I’m not alone: as an uncredited article at New Mars suggests:
To date our relationship with space has been defined by two things: our parents and the Challenger disaster. Gen-X has been told since birth that the glorious moments in space history came before our time. We learned about the Apollo Moon landings from endless TV documentaries, heard again and again from our parents how much pride and wonder they felt while watching Armstrong's steps. Our defining moment with space, in contrast, was not stunning success but tragic failure. Challenger is our generation's tragedy, our moral equivalent of JFK's assassination. Where were you? I was in my sixth grade classroom, and I remember looking at Kevin Frasier and feeling loss for the first time. With this background it is clear why we feel that space is not our generation's issue. Space was our parents' triumph, and our tragedy.
The piece goes on to suggest that we might reclaim a positive destiny in space by going to Mars, which would “give us a goal and a destination, at a time when too many of us feel neither” -- and I agree. (Tim Cavanaugh at Reason would probably disagree: he’s an Xer with a radically different take on the legacy of Challenger for our generation.)
Who knows? Maybe someday there’ll be a Christa McAuliffe Elementary School on the Red Planet.
(You can support science and mathematics education in the United States -- which badly needs some help -- by making a donation to the Challenger Center, which was founded by the families of the Challenger astronauts to further the educational goals of that lost shuttle mission.)
