CHALLENGER

I hate news articles. They take something personal and emotional and real. They slap the event onto a journalistic operating table, cut the heart out and sew the story back together as a Frankenstein’s monster of black and white facts and figures. I guess that’s why I prefer blogs.

Case in point: I just read MSNBC’s article on the Challenger accident. James Oberg’s angle seemed to be to write the piece as a “mythbuster” style expose, a “we know what happened better than you do, even though you were there” article. Here’s my least favorite quote: “Historians, reporters, and every citizen need to take the time this week to remember what really happened, and especially to make sure their memories are as close as humanly possible to what really did happen.” That just speaks volumes, doesn’t it? In effect, he’s saying, “Hey, I’m a journalist, so pardon me while I tell you what to think and what to remember about what happened to you.” Contrast that attitude with the typical blogger who says, “Hey, this event happened to me personally and this is how I remember it and feel about it.”

The article mostly just seemed to quibble over words and nuances, like the definition of “explosion.” Give me a break. I really had trouble with the main distinction Oberg tried to make between people like me who watched it live and most of the general population who caught it later that day on tape. He accurately points out that not many people caught the actual live broadcast, but I think he is missing the point. I mean, I wasn’t watching live TV when the planes hit the Twin Towers, but the deal was that I did see it happen on TV. A small time delay didn’t make it any less unreal or any more palatable. I think the same is true of the Challenger tragedy. Who cares when we watched it? We did, in effect, all watch it. And we all felt like we watched it together.

So in an effort to counter balance that historically revisionist article, here are some of the things that I remember from that day: 20 years ago today, I was an 11-year-old 5th grader in Mrs. Holcomb’s class. NASA had spent a lot of time and money that year on a campaign to sell the space program to America’s school kids, myself included. Knowing that mostly just school kids got to watch the launch via satellite made me feel like a dignitary. This was the kids’ launch, after all. NASA said so. They even went so far as to put Christa McAuliffe, a teacher, on the flight crew.

Their campaign was a success. We identified with the crew. We had studied their bios and drawn pictures of them to hang on our bulletin boards. The models we made of the space shuttle hung from yarn all around our classroom. My group of friends and I played “space camp” during every afternoon recess. Challenger filled our school culture. It filled our class time. It filled our dreams.

So when it suddenly went missing in a cloud of flames, it left my generation of school kids empty and hurting. Our cheers of joy died into shocked silence. I had talked about the space shuttle launch every single day from the time my teacher told me about it until the moment it happened. But after that day, I didn’t talk about it again for years. The crew’s pictures came down off the bulletin board and the models went into the trash. My friends and I stopped playing astronauts and went back to kickball. NASA had lost its place in our imaginations. It was the end of an era.

I can still remember the newspaper picture of the local teacher who just missed her chance of flying on the Challenger. I think she and I had a lot in common that year. With our feet safely resting on the ground, we found our hearts hurting and our dreams disappointed, our lives forever altered by the tragedy that was the Space Shuttle Challenger.