The Dread Pirate Froggy takes no survivors.

[anagramofbrat]

Something I ran across elsewhere on LJ alerted me to the fact that space officially lost its cool factor a quarter century ago today.

I very clearly remember Challenger, it was actually the first national disaster of sorts that I was reasonably sentient for. Enough to be affected by it, anyway. I was seven, in second grade, all excited because we all had been reading those Scholastic kids' newsletters about Christa McAuliffe (holy shit, I still remember her name) being the First Teacher In Space! and like most kids, thought her class was the luckiest in America. (Yeah, no.) Dad was also all excited about it because one of the crew was Ronald McNair, who happened to be a member of Omega Psi Phi and in the fashion of all black fraternities and their brothers, this was a Very Big Deal. I mean, regardless it was still a Big Deal, McNair being only the second African American in space ever with his previous Challenger mission in 1984.

Me being seven and still hazy on racial politics/dynamics (attending an international school where being American of any stripe/color was the minority you got teased about tended to blunt that a bit) my focus was on the teacher. One of the random little details mentioned in the newsletter profile was that she always carried a stuffed frog for luck, for some reason this is the one thing that still sticks in my head, even though I've seen it mentioned nowhere else since. Little things about a person tend to get lost when they perish in a space accident.

Thankfully I wasn't one of the kids instantly traumatized by watching the launch live. But I do remember my teacher being called out of the classroom by our principal for a few minutes during Reading Time, then coming back to tearfully announce that there had been an accident and all seven of Challenger's crew were dead. I remember one of my friends at the time started crying hysterically at that point and I hugged her until she stopped, but I don't remember crying myself. Just sort of went through the rest of my day kinda of O_o and not really believing it until I got home and saw the disintegration footage on the news. Even so, I still thought that it kinda looked like a big bit of orange cotton candy and it was hard to realize that I had just in essence watched seven people die. I had the same problem a decade and a half later with 9/11 footage, something that didn't get fully brought home until a conversation I had with cell23 at Ground Zero a couple years ago. It's not so much you yourself seeing someone die on national TV - the fucked up part is everyone seeing it.

I always had this crazy fantasy that the stuffed frog somehow survived and went on to have adventures of its own, either at sea or in space. Mostly piratical ones. Occasionally I get it conflated with Cartman's Clyde Frog on South Park, either as the same frog or as some sort of slashy gay frog crossover romance. Yeah, my brain is weird like that.

Anyway, that's my tl;dr "where were you" moment. To Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair and Christa McAuliffe, you are missed, and you are remembered.

Comments

[plexq.livejournal.com]

I was still in England when the Challenger disaster occurred, and I don't remember it very well unfortunately. It was very distant from me, and it wasn't as heavily covered in the British press as it was in the US.

9/11 on the other hand, I remember very clearly. I was at work, and my boss at the time was an ex-banker, so had CSPAN up the whole day, and he called me into his office when the footage came on. It was pretty shocking, and they closed the office shortly after and everyone went home.

[rhipowered.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I don't remember it, but...the relation to 9/11 footage and the fuckedupness of it all...yeah. (A BBC programme just threw the second plane/tower collision footage at me the other day, basically out of nowhere, and I was utterly stunned.)

[harinezumi.livejournal.com]

When it happened, Challenger didn't particularly register with me, since I was in the USSR at the time and saw it as just another American rocket blowing up. Considering what happened three months later, it got pretty much completely overshadowed in my memory until I immigrated and found out it was a Big Deal over here.

FWIW, Judith Resnik was a CMU graduate and had a dorm in the center of campus named after her, so I've generally associated the disaster with her, rather than McAuliffe. Still, a terrible waste of talented people all around, and a huge setback for progress into space.

[bottledgoose.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, yeah. 1986 was kind of the suck, eh? :P Chernobyl didn't even really register with me until National Geographic did a story on it about a year or so after it happened. Between that and the pictures from the recently discovered Titanic wreckage, third grade was full of interesting nightmares of radioactive ghost ships that may or may not still have an influence on my general terror of open water.

Seriously, NatGeo is not a good thing to read if you're an impressionable kid with an overactive imagination.

[kshandra]

It's not so crazy, actually. One of the finalists for the Teacher In Space program was an instructor from the high school I transferred to in the fall of '86; he'd gotten to be good friends with several of the astronauts, and sent a MESA pin up with them.

The pin was one of the things that washed ashore.

ANYTHING is possible.

[nireena.livejournal.com]

i was in 3rd grade at the time. they herded us all into another classroom. we thought we were in trouble at first, because that was usually the only time that they had all of a grade together like that. the elementary school had only 1 tv on a wheeled cart that they brought in and they showed us the news. i grew up in NH, and several of the teachers at my school either knew CMcA or had worked with her. i remember we were subdued as we shuffled out so the next group of kids could go in and watch the news clip.

i was a big space geek when i was little. i guess it hadn't occurred to me before then that space exploration was dangerous and people could die doing it.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

I vaguely remember, but my story is one of those "little kids can say hurtful things without meaning to" stories, since I was five at the time.

[twirlgrrl.livejournal.com]

I remember the teacher the best; I think she got the most press. I was in college, a sophomore, and pretty oblivious to the larger world at the time, but I found it horrifying nonetheless.