25th Anniversery

[Mynock]

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

President Ronald Reagan - January 28, 1986

I was 3 days shy of 4 years old when this happened....my earliest clear childhood memory is sitting in front of one of those old console TV's the size of a Buick and bawling my eyes out while they replayed the footage again, and again and again.....I've seen alot of bad things since then but nothing has ever hit me harder then seeing that stack blow.
RIP Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis & Christa McAuliffe....you are not forgotten.

[Duncan Edwards]

I didn't have to go to work that morning and being the spaceflight uber-geek that I am I was in front of the tv. Launches had become so "routine" for the media that regular broadcast television didn't even provide full coverage any longer. As a backup I had the National Space Society hotline on the phone and was listening to it that way. Since it was then an expensive toll call I hung up when I saw that NBC was going to show it. About a minute after launch they then cut away and I got back on the phone in time to hear "obviously a major malfunction". A few seconds after that some thinking person at the local NBC affiliate cut to the CNN coverage (this was before cable here) without waiting. As soon as I saw the cloud and the spiralling boosters I knew what had happened and what the inevitable results were. Switching to CBS and hoping for Walter Cronkite I got Dan Rather making a royal doofus of himself talking about a lot of things he didn't know. Unlike Dan and much of America I knew what I was seeing and pretty much what it meant not only for that moment but for the future of humanity beyond it's planetary cradle. The immediate and likely long-term future for all mankind changed that morning in ways that most don't understand or have time to consider. Beyond just losing seven good people we lost a good piece of the hope for our future.

[kham]

Sitting in the cafeteria playing cards in college with the launch on the TV, not even watching it, until someone cried out the shuttle had exploded. Literally said "yeah, right" and turned around to see the cloud. The rest of the day was spent watching that launch cycle replayed endlessly on the various news channels.

Always gets me, watching those boosters just wandering off on their own, until the rso finally destructed them. Haunting

[QuicksandMania]

I had been working three weeks at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) as a student intern (age 19) when I witnessed the event live from the Launch Control Center. I have remained continuously employed at NASA since then though obviously with a few semester-long "leave without pay" absences to complete my engineering degree in late 1988. I still work at KSC. We had our annual NASA Day of Remembrance yesterday:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110128/sc_ ... d_columbia

[Lomax]

I was 23 days shy of 10 when that happened. I remember my parents used to wake me up early when they showed shuttle launches on TV when I was younger.

I was pretty much that age when the whole world stopped to follow the attempts to save Apollo 13.

I also remember being allowed to sit up late to watch Neil Armstrong make that One Giant Leap.

I can't help thinking that mankind has missed a turn somewhere.....