Note: It’s been 40 years since nearly everyone in this country witnessed what has become one of the most unusual tragedies in American history.
On live television, 74 seconds after the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger, something went drastically wrong and the aircraft literally exploded before our bewildered eyes. The following is an editorial I wrote that appeared in the Feb. 5, 1986 edition of The Mystician, the Bismarck State College newspaper.
Jan. 28, 1986 will be remembered by Americans for a long time, just like Dec. 7, 1941 and Nov. 22, 1963. The space shuttle tragedy can only be described as horrible shock. It’s a shock to every American who assumed this flight of the Challenger would be another routine mission.
Why did this tragic event occur? Are we getting too far ahead of ourselves in technology? Perhaps not. Maybe it was just an accident that couldn’t have been stopped.
It does, however, bring to mind all the air disasters in the past few years. People take air travel for granted, but there have been some recent plane crashes.
The Space Shuttle explosion will make people think twice about how routine a flight like this actually is and what it entails.
Teachers in space, journalists in space, doctors in space, they are all examples of what NASA has in mind. That may change.
Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first teacher in space, can be described as a brave American because she knew the risk involved. Imagine, however, what went through the minds of all her students in Concord, N.H., as they watched the Space Shuttle explode on live television.
Prior to the departure, a teacher from Velva and a teacher from Dickinson were among the 100 finalists for the teacher in space program. Will they continue to seek out space travel after this?
On the other hand, is this just another setback on the road to progress? It was in 1865 that Jules Verne wrote a book called De La Terre À La Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) about sending men to the moon from a base in Florida. One-hundred-four years later it actually happened.
In the 1970s, NASA conceived Space Shuttle flights, becoming a reality just 10 years on. We have landed a spacecraft on Mars, and now have a probe (Voyager) traveling through deep space.
Its the fascination of exploration that will keep Americans moving ahead on the space program. Our forefathers moved ahead when they colonized America. It was done again when people crossed the North Pole for the first time and again when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface.
After so many flights, it makes a person wonder why this would happen now? The bottom line here is the Space Shuttle is expensive and taxpayers will want to know why this happened.
The period of mourning is over, but this tragedy will be remembered for a long time to come, especially in the minds of the school children in Concord, N.H.
What were you doing when the Space Shuttle exploded? Were you watching TV or listening to the radio? Some people from North Dakota were actually at Cape Canaveral watching it from the ground. I was a college student working after school in a food warehouse in Bismarck. I was bagging oranges when a co-worker walked up to my bench and told me what had happened.
This guy was the warehouse clown, but he had an incredible serious look on his face. I knew it was no joke. Something awful had just happened. When I got home from work that night, I watched the news cycle repeating itself about the day’s events.
There was a short period of time after that in which we discussed the explosion in sociology class. It wasn’t part of the curriculum, but the professor told us it was something we needed to talk about before we moved on to other subject matter.
