![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
