Quicksand Fans

30 Years ago today. Dave in Texas has a little remembrance here

Another one of those days seared into the collective consciousness. I was attending university at the time... had an early class so I didn't hear about it until the noon newscasts. A friend of mine was celebrating her birthday and wasn't keen on having it line up with such a public tragedy. Two things I remember most distinctly: the image of those booster rockets flying away out of control after the explosion, and the horrified looks on the faces of everyone on the ground who watched it happen. Hard to forget the looks on all of the students watching their teacher Christa McAuliffe die on live television, not to mention her parents.

Was sitting playing cards in the cafeteria when someone watching the bigscreen said "holy shit, the shuttle blew up!" I think I said something like , yeah right, and turned around and there it was live. And the endlessly repeating footage that just would not stop. That was worse than the breakup I think.

I was working at Kennedy Space Center (where I still work) my very first term as a cooperative education student intern ... my third week at NASA ... and watched the whole thing live from the outside staircase of the Launch Control Center (LCC).

I will never forget that day. At the time, we lived in Kamloops, BC, and I was attending Cariboo College (now Thompson University), and taking computer courses using a VAX 11/780. At that time, I was wracking my brain, trying to remember the theme music for a tv show I had used to watch years earlier, "Tales Of The Gold Monkey". I could only remember the first few seconds of it, but the rest was a blank, and it had been bothering me for I can't remember how long (even spent nights in bed, running that beginning fragment over and over again in my head to no avail). Then, during a break after one computing class, I was in a computer lab, when the rest of the theme music finally came to me! I was extremely elated about finally breaking down that mental block! But, my euphoric mood was short-lived when, after the break was over, and I went back into the classroom for the next computer class, our female instructor broke the bad news to us, that the space shuttle had blown up. I was in shock, and when I got home after classes, I watched the repeated videos of the tragedy. Since then, I can't think about the "Tales Of The Gold Monkey" theme without thinking about the Challenger tragedy, and vice versa.

I was, and remain, a devoted space and aviation buff and never missed a launch. Arranged my day off to be in front of the tv for it. 1986 was going to be a big year since polar launches were going to begin from Vandenburg AFB. The Centaur uppoer stage was going to launch Galileo. The HST was about to happen. It was the best time for manned space since Apollo. This being in the days after television lost interest and before the internet I was listening to the launch control feed from the National Space Society dial up on the phone. Broadcast tv picked up coverage seconds before ignition so I hung up the expensive dial-up. Television then cut off about 30 seconds after launch so I dialed up the phone feed again just in time to hear "obviously a major malfunction". Someone at the local tv level had sense enough to realize that something was happening and cut immediately to CNN in time for me to see the SRB's chasing through the sky. I knew it was over before the flight dynamics officer reported that the vehicle had exploded. By now Dan Rather was babbling idiot things about escape capsules and the camera was focused on one of the SRB drogues floating down. People began calling to ask me what had happened since I was kind of the "expert" they all knew. A lot more got messed up, stopped, and ruined that day than a lot of people are aware of.

From Popular Mechanics Oral History of Challenger Disaster Some pretty good stuff here. And clearly some certain disgraced asshole former CBS anchor trying to portray in better light. Also, underlines what absolute utter scum the media are. They haven't changed a bit. Neither has NASA. Chuck has some rather unflattering things to say. And he's dead-on

"If we die we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
Gus Grissom MR-4 CDR Gemini 3, CDR Apollo 1

Everyone seems to forget Gus, Ed, and Roger. That anniversary was not long ago either

this was on twitter the other day, not a bad take