Twenty years seems like a long time; two thirds of my lifetime ago. I guess that qualifies as a long time ago.
When I was a kid my Dad had to do two weeks active duty every year to fulfill his obligation to the Navy Reserve. Being the creative sort of guy he is he managed to get assignments in places where the family could go along and we’d have a family vacation. That’s how I got to go to San Diego twice, Orlando, Denver, and Charleston before I was ten. I guess 1986 was a Navy trip but I really can’t remember. One way or another I was standing in the freezing Floridian cold with my family and my grandmother, parked alongside of a causeway, across some great body of water about five miles from Launch Pad B on January 28, 1986.
Oddly for me, space head that I was, I had no interest in heading over to Cape Canveral to see the Shuttle launch. Mom, of course, said I was just in a hurry to get to Disney World. Probably a correct assessment. Who would want to miss a once in a lifetime experience like seeing a Shuttle launch? There we were, cameras trained on the pad, radio in the car blaring the launch countdown.
T +3.375 “Liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.”
My Mom had her camera trained on the Shuttle as it went up, finger mashed down on the shutter, leaving us with a great series of photos of the plume of smoke rising up into the cold blue sky.
T +10.000 “Roger roll, Challenger.”
It seems to me like that moment was the first of what happened next. The next thing I clearly recall happened fifty-six seconds later. I think by that time Mom had burned through her roll of film and was scrambling to refill the camera. Grandma had only taken one or two snapshots of the launch and was still standing ready for whatever happened next.
T+66.000 “Capcom, go at throttle up.”
T+70.000 “Roger, go at throttle up.”
And that’s it. That was the moment. At least in my mind. What happened next happened immediately. Nobody even knew what was going on. Ten seconds passed. We watched a gigantic ball of smoke erupt at the top of the exhaust column, two contrails shot out of the ball, one to each side, and veered crazily off to the side. I was sure, I know I said, that was the booster separation. All of us waited for the Shuttle to come out in the middle, leaping for the sky on a pillar of flame and smoke. Nothing happened. The two contrails that shot out burst into their own puffs of smoke while a little rainshower of smoky trails fell lazily from the right side of the main cloud. Grandma snapped a couple of photos. Still waiting.
T+1 min 56 sec “Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.”
Ya think? What the hell is going on? OK, best guess, something happened, they separated the boosters early. Where’s the Shuttle? Maybe it’s far enough up it doesn’t leave a contrail anymore? Somewhere in here we heard a great roaring sound. Afterwards we all figured it was the explosion but I figure it was the delayed launch noise or the sonic boom. No way to know for sure.
T+2 min 50 sec “We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded.”
After that I don’t remember clearly what happened. It may be that we had already started back to the west in the minute before the malfunction announcement and the explosion announcement. Unknowing disbelief can’t even begin to cover it. Shell shocked might be the closest description. I remember afterward sitting in the Sandpiper – I think that was the Officer’s Club – with the big screen in the corner running a constant stream of updates going over the same information again and again while we tried to eat lunch. I remember us trying to think of what to do with the rest of the day. It was too late to start a day at Disney. Where could we go to get away from the televisions and radios? I didn’t want to hear any more. I’d been there. I’d seen it. What happened, happened. I’m only a couple of miles away from the Happiest Place on Earth and I just saw the Space Shuttle blow up seventy-three seconds after launch. So much for happiness that day. I remember nightmares that night about the astronauts and I remember the shock wearing off as we tore into five days at Disney. I remember buying every commemorative magazine my Dad carried at the store and storing them, along with my Mom and Grandma’s developed photos in a manila folder. I still have that folder somewhere among the detritus of my life. I remember coming back to Pennsylvania and finding that the big news story was Bud Dwyer’s televised suicide. The news cycle is tight, even twenty years ago. I remember Reagan’s speech, the memorials in Arlington, reading High Flight and waiting for NASA to recover. I remember Groundhog Day 2003 and thinking “Not again” as a friend told me to turn on the TV on another bright chilly day.
I’ve been a lot of places and I’ve seen a lot of things. I’ve seen politicians and personalities. I’ve been in movies and on TV. But I don’t think there’s anything I can re-experience with more clarity than those few moments standing on the side of the road on a frigid Florida day in January, twenty years ago today.
All quotes are taken from a conglomerated UPI transcript of the day