Challenger 40th Anniversary

[Mynock]

Had myself a minute of silence this morning. One of the earliest memories I have is not quite three year old me crying and watching it blow.

"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their Journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of Earth, to touch the face of God."

Francis R. (Dick) Scobee
Michael J. Smith
Ronald E. McNair
Ellison Onizuka
Judith A. Resnik
Gregory Jarvis
Christa McAuliffe

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[QuicksandMania]

I was three weeks into my first rotation as a cooperative education engineering intern student at NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida at age 19 and watched this accident from the staircase outside the Launch Control Center (LCC).

Many years later, in February 2003, I was in the landing convoy at Kennedy Space Center waiting for Columbia to land when it failed to land and instead disintegrated in the atmosphere over Texas.

Insiders will tell you that NASA still seems not to have learned some of its hard lessons. I agreed with this assessment and retired in 2022 at Minimum Retirement Age (MRA) to avoid further trauma. I hope Artemis II goes well. The female astronaut on that mission attended the same high school and university I attended, so I feel a certain kind of special connection with that launch.