January 28, 1986

Photos here

I have a mixed relationship with the sciences. Until high school, I loved participating in science fairs, contemplating black holes and listening to "2001: a Space Odyssey" and a National Geographic record called "Space Sounds." My scrapbook was full of newspaper clippings on new planetary moons, shuttle launches and supernovas. My sister and I would lie upside down on my canopy bed and pretend we were getting ready for lift-off. While most of my friends were busy seeing themselves as teachers or nurses, I proudly stated that I wanted to be a paleontologist, and then, an astronaut. In junior high, I participated in a science fair with a project on natural dyes. Another year, I made crystals. By the time I was ready for high school, I had won a few science prizes at my school and was really jazzed about the idea of studying biology. Unfortunately, chemistry and physics altered my earlier relationship with science, and although I still maintain a love for all things "outer space," I have long considered myself to be essentially a "language person," which is really kind of silly.

On January 28, 1986, I was not yet a teenager. That day, classes were cancelled due to snow -- as they often are this time of year in northeast Ohio -- and my mom had taken my friends and me to the ice skating rink where I had taken lessons for the past few years. At some point, I recall an adult coming to get us early, and being disappointed because we weren't ready to go. When I got home, my mom was crying and glued to the TV, which my father was also watching (a rarity, as he was not a big fan of TV). The space shuttle Challenger had exploded just 73 seconds after liftoff (video here). Perhaps because both my parents were teachers, they took this news especially hard; on the Challenger, teacher Christa McAuliffe would be making her first flight into space. In addition, one of the astronauts, Judy Resnick, was from Akron, just over an hour away from us. My reaction, outwardly, was measured. But inside, I just could not believe it. I felt crushed, as if I had been a partner in the same project as the astronauts -- space! Glorious space! How could this happen?

Later on in the day, we had to go to the store for something. It was a store with audio equipment of some kind and there were TVs playing. One of my vivid recollections is seeing and hearing the TVs playing the story. That night, and in the coming weeks, I did nothing but write in my journal about the Challenger disaster, recording details about the flight and the astronauts and my reaction to the new information being revealed. Even though I was still a child, I had the sense that something major had occurred that would change what happened in years to come. I wanted to be able to say, "I wrote about this when it happened and here are my reflections."

The Challenger disaster changed the face of the entire space program in the United States. It meant the end of this sort of golden era of space exploration (or at least, what we had seen as such) -- and this feels quite evident in my childhood scrapbook, when there are no longer any newspaper articles on new moons, photos of planetary rings or shuttle launches. As a professor, explaining this change (in terms of memory) can be a challenge.

In several of my classes, when we've spoken about photography and collective memory, I show a series of well-known photographs with no captions and ask students to identify the event depicted in the photo and also, to provide an approximate year or time period for the image. To me, the trails of white smoke against a dark blue sky (seen in the photo at the start of this post) are immediately identifiable as the Challenger explosion. Yet quite often, students are unsure what this is -- some recall the 2003 Columbia disaster instead.

It is unbelievable to me that today marks 25 years since the Challenger disaster. Though so much time has passed, it is easy to recall the pit in my throat that day when I learned about the explosion and what it meant for the seven astronauts and their families. In some ways, Challenger was my first real experience with death. It is one of those moments where I will "never forget where I was" when I heard the news.

Since 1986, space exploration, though it may have evolved considerably in some ways (the Hubble telescrope, the International Space Station, no moon exploration, suggestions of going to Mars, etc.), is still very much influenced by national and transnational politics. In the U.S. January 28, 1986 was a defining moment of 80s history (in addition to the images of the catastrophe, think of Ronald Reagan's "heroes" speech that night -- "a day for mourning and remembering"). The space program was suspended for several years. We no longer pursued shuttle launches and explorations with the same frequency or sense of "news-worthiness." In some ways, this is evident even in the manner in which the Columbia disaster was covered in February 2003. Today, it is difficult to say what is in store for NASA or future shuttle missions, particularly after proposed cuts by the Obama administration.