Days That I Can't Shake - 28th January 1986

There are events that burn themselves into memory - Kennedy's assassination, the moon landing and so on. I was not born or was too young for these two but I clearly recall the first day that scorched a mark on my mind. It was the 28th January 1986 - the day of the Challenger disaster which took the lives of all seven astronauts including the first civilian in space, Teacher Christa McAuliffe.

As I live on the opposite side of the planet to the USA, I was awoken to the disaster on the morning of the 29th January. It was the last week of vacation before beginning my first year of University and had become accustomed to sleeping in late. I spent most of the day glued to the news reports of the disastrous 73 second last flight of Challenger. The words "go for throttle-up", seeing the explosion and tendrils of water vapour and from the exploded main fuel tank and smoke from the prematurely separated solid rocket boosters have left an indelible mark on my mind.

I must have seen that sequence on the TV nearly fifty times that day. However it was not the actual explosion that I remember the most, it was the camera that was tracking the faces of Christa McCauliffe's aged parents. You could tell that they had thought that everything was going normally at the time of the explosion - yet they had just witnessed the death of their daughter and six of her crewmates. It took several minutes before they realised what had actually happened and that a day of celebration had turned into a day of mourning.

In the days ahead came grainy video taken through the tracking telescopes that showed the crew section of the shuttle had remained essentially intact during the explosion. You could clearly make out the nose cone and flight deck of the shuttle in one piece falling back to earth. It was concluded that many of the crew may have survived the explosion only to die in the inevitable impact over the Atlantic Ocean.

In memory of:
Francis "Dick" Scobee, Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
Gregory Jarvis, Payload Specialist
Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Spaceflight Participant