Forty years ago today, the temperature was a record cold of 26 degrees, and my friend Leanne and I were looking forward to watching the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger from our front yard. She and her young daughter were visiting, and I was eager for her to see Central Florida's most exciting show. But instead of awaiting the launch outdoors, we opted to keep our two preschool children inside and watch from our big front window.
The folks at NASA should have been as concerned about the cold. We all know what happened that day.
At Porter's office, worked stopped to observe the launch. Heather watched with her first-grade classmates from the school playground.
We were never quite the same again.
(Much later, Heather would graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where Judy Resnick was especially honored. Then she moved to New Hampshire, home of Christa McAuliffe. Some events refuse to let themselves be forgotten.)
Living in Central Florida, regularly watching shuttle launches, thrilling to the double sonic boom of the landings, and having a cousin who worked for NASA in the early years made this a tragedy especially close to my heart. I was appalled by the number of people in other parts of the country and the world who were making jokes about it. (This was well before there was social media to inure us to heartlessness.) Here in Central Florida this day is a "where were you when...?" question, like "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" and "Where were you when the Twin Towers came down?"
I asked at choir practice tonight, "Do you know where you were 40 years ago today?" And the stories came out.
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
—John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
(Read by President Ronald Reagan in honor of the Challenger astronauts.)
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