Thirty years ago, I can remember waking up, throwing on some
clothes and heading to class. As a
college student there were many late nights and mornings that were rushed
because I had overslept. January 28th
was no different. After my class, I was
heading back to my dorm when I noticed people talking to each other more than
usual. As I was going up the elevator to
the 9th floor dorm where I lived, I hear the horrifying news.
My parents took us on a trip around the United States when I
was 11 in 1978. I remember visiting the Badlands, the Gettysburg battlefield,
walked around Independence Hall and touched the Liberty bell. I remember seeing the Capitol and White
House, visiting Arlington and Arlington Cemetery and seeing Mount Vernon. I remember sitting by the ocean in
Charleston, riding through a rainstorm in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and
enjoying all the rides and sights at Disney World. One thing that I remember most clearly was
visiting Cape Canaveral. I am not sure I
understood the significance of the Saturn rocket that was there on display…I
just remember that it was huge. There were all kind of things that were
interesting and new to me. Everything
that I had seen thus far on the trip represented the natural world or something
from history. I saw sitting on the tarmac
on display, the Enterprise, which was the prototype for the shuttle
program. That was something that made an
impression on me, for I was told that pretty soon, a shuttle would go up into
space and then come back down and land on the ground like a plane. You have to understand that I was of an age
that I didn’t remember the Mercury or the Gemini space programs. I was either not alive or too young for it to
make an impression on me. This was
something that I was excited to experience and represented the future of NASA.
In 1982, the first Shuttle, Columbia, took off for
space. I remember watching it on
television and thinking how cool it was to see the blastoff. By the time the Challenger took off on Jan 28
1986, it was something that was almost “old hat!” I knew about Christa McAuliffe as the first
teacher in space, but I didn’t know any of the other astronaut’s names. When I got back to my room that morning of
the 28th of January in 1986, the first thing I did was turn on the
television. I sat there in horror
watching the blast off of the shuttle and the explosion just a short time
later. It was being rebroadcast over and
over again, all the time with the newscasters saying that recovery efforts were
being undertaken. I was not so naive to
think anyone could have survived that terrible day. There are pictures from that day that I have
never been able to get out of my mind.
The horror on the faces of the crowd watching the takeoff…especially that
of Christa McAuliffe’s parents…or the faces of the students who were so excited
and then so traumatized. The picture
that has always stayed in my mind was that of the astronauts as they strode
confidently out to the bus that was to take them to the Challenger as they were
preparing for liftoff.
For the rest of my life…whenever I hear the quote “slipped
the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God!” that Reagan used in his
speech on TV. I have to say that of
everything that I heard said or done during that week…that quote was strangely
comforting. The lines came from a poem
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr, a pilot who was killed in action in 1941 while
flying a Spitfire as an RAF pilot. The
poem “High Flight” was enclosed in a letter to his parents shortly before his
death.
Over the next months and years, we learned what happened to
the Challenger and NASA tried to fix what was broken and on Sept 29, 1988, the
Discovery took off to restart the Shuttle program. I never became blasé about the shuttle again
and was sad to see another accident happen in 2003 when Columbia blew apart
during re-entry. When the last shuttle,
Atlantis, flew its last mission on July 8, 2011, it was sad to me to see it
end. It was the first NASA program that
I had seen the first flight and the touchdown of the last flight.
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| Me (Carmen Johnson) in my dorm room. |
