At high school watching it on a little portable TV in the library - next to the guy who would become the Lead Flight Coordinator for the Mars Rover project 20 years later.
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We were âluckyâ enough to have the entire school in a special assembly to watch it, and then were hurried out of the room soon after the explosion. I just thank goodness we didnât have HD TV at the time, it was scarring enough for us to see low-def trails of smoke.
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I was in middle school. Some kids were talking about it, and some kids didnât believe it, thinking someone was spreading a rumor. Because middle school. Our science teacher told us that it really happened, while choking back tears. When youâre a kid, itâs so hard to see a grown-up cry.
I grew up in the Antelope Valley, so a lot of kids had parents who worked on the shuttle program in one way or another. They renamed a street to Challenger Way in memory. And, a bunch of years later, they renamed another street to Columbia. I just wish they hadnât made them intersecting streets. Thatâs a depressing corner for folks who remember them both.
I am not a fan of Ronald Reagan, but he gave a good speech. It was comforting and respectful. Everything else he did was shit, but he was a good president on that day.
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Sitting in high school during class, intercom announcement. Moment of silence for the lives lost, high school wide, and during the silence this song was playing in the office in the background on a nearby radio and it got broadcast accidentally over the intercom, at low volume, in the moment of silence.
That is why I have always associated this particular song with the Challenger disaster.
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I remember seeing it on the telly. Not live, I guess, although it would have been after school in the UK. I think I probably saw it on the news that evening.
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If only the Apollo Mission had gone tits up, Nixon could have had a high point in his Presidency too.
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8th grade, and also in California so it happened just as the school day was starting, I think. I remember watching it in a classroom but I donât think it was live. I remember being determined to design an escape pod for future shuttle missions, a project I abandoned as soon as my aerospace engineer father took my interest as an opportunity to try and teach me calculus.
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I donât remember where I was during the day it happened. But I distinctly remember coming home to my sisterâs blithely unconcerned âOh, did you hear ⌠?â and then retiring to my room so she wouldnât see tears.
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I was 4, and oblivious. Not much has changed other than getting older and more crabby.
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It was announced over the intercom during my French class in high school. Oddly, I canât remember what my reaction was; my memory really has gone to hell. I was definitely keeping a journal at the time (being a teenage girl), so Iâd have to dig it up and see if I wrote anything down.
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It happened in time for Newsround on Childrenâs BBC. I wouldnât be surprised if that was where I found out what happened.
Confirmed on Wikipedia, it was the first BBC news program to report it.
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[quote=âthe_borderer, post:31, topic:72939â]
Newsround on Childrenâs BBC
[/quote]That may well have been where I first saw it. I was living in Sheffield, walking through the city centre probably on my way home from a college placement: I have a vivid memory of a big window display of televisions, all showing the explosion. In those days, way before smartphones, the only immediate way of finding out what had happened was to stay and watch the window display.
Newsround was a great programme. I remember during the Falklands War, military relatives saying they watched it, because they knew it would be the most sensitive way of hearing disastrous news.
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I was at work, an architechtural signage company. Not sure why we had a tv there, but pretty sure it was to watch the launch.
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I canât remember for sure if we watched it at school or not. I was in my sophomore year of high school. I do distinctly remember my first reaction: not shock or sadness, but just frustration. My thought was âthis will set back the shuttle program for a decade.â
I felt that same kind of tired, âson-of-a-***BITCH!!!***â frustration on 9/11.
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I was instrumenting a test bay at C-36, testing section, Small Rocket Motors Division, Morton-Thiokol. I was dealing with the annoying consequences of a hang-fire and missed the live coverage, and saw the first replay start when I re-entered the control room.
I was the second youngest guy in the building; it was my first job after getting my college degree. Although admittedly I got my degree fairly late in life.
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4th grade. We all got pulled into the assembly room to watch the launch.
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In my cradle, presumably⌠I was five months old.
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At work, where we designed and built the Shuttle main engines. We usually watched the launches on common area monitors, but everybody got so jaded from launch after launch, that the monitors were in most areas left off on Jan 28.
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Asleep/out of it. Or trying to get to that point. Honestly canât remember much about that year and at the time this sort of thing seemed a long way off and not all that important.
What can I say, I was a dick back then.
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Sixth grade, taking a math test. When the announcement came on that the shuttle had exploded and that teachers could bring us to the gym to talk about it Mr. Stone sent someone up to say that we wouldnât be doing that.
Yeah, I still hold a grudge about it. Goddamned Mr. Stone.
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