For spaceflight enthusiasts, this is a tough time of year. The three big accidents in American spaceflight history -- Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia -- all happened either at the end of January or the start of February. (To add to the eerie nature, Columbia's final crew paid an on-orbit tribute to those astronauts a few days before they themselves joined their fallen comrades.)
The Apollo fire happened a few years before I was born, so that was already the stuff of yesteryear when I became aware of the space program and got interested in space and aviation. I remember the run-up to STS-1 fairly well and remained interested until Shuttle flights became more or less routine. I lost interest and went on to other things. Then, one cold January day, I was at school and the rumors started to fly around the lunchroom. We didn't have televisions in all our classrooms (and we could only get piped-in instructional television over the closed circuit system, anyway), so we weren't able to see anything. In my next class, the teacher said there had been an accident with the Space Shuttle, the one the teacher was going up on. Then, at the end of the day, the assistant principal confirmed it during the end-of-day announcements.
My brother picked me up from school and we listened to the news coverage during the drive home, and then spent the rest of the day watching the coverage on television. We must have seen the replay of the explosion a dozen times or more. We watched President Reagan give his famous speech, as it happened. And after the coverage ended, life kind of went on. There were special reports later in the evening, of course, but it was surreal to have been watching all this coverage of this horrific thing, only to be sitting there hours later watching Moonlighting. I remember having trouble trying to reconcile that.
And that's where my life changed, though I didn't know it. Challenger had the perverse effect of rekindling my interest in spaceflight and aviation. In some way, every turn my life has taken since was because of that awful thing. The trajectory of my life -- and it's a wonderful life -- but that trajectory changed because of this terrible occurrence.
I've never been sure how to feel about that. I know about how big things have tiny starts, the whole "a butterfly flaps its wings" thing, and I know the world turns and things happen, but it's still weird. And I wish this trajectory, which has brought me a wonderful life with great joy and discovery, hadn't been instigated by the deaths of seven space travelers.
Comments