Twenty years ago today, the Challenger blew up. Good Lord, could it have been that long? I want to say it seems like just yesterday, but there’s lots that came in between: the last two of my kids were born, the Soviet Union fell, Bill Clinton was impeached, a couple wackos opened fire down the street at Columbine High School, the Internet happened, a score of wackos flew some airplanes into buildings on 9/11, we kicked ass and took names in the Middle East, twice. Okay, the first time we didn’t take names, but hey.
So it hasn’t been exactly a boring twenty years. But it’s still a really long time.
Ronald Reagan was the president. They called him the Great Communicator, and all his skills came into play that night as he addressed the nation. Notice the reference to how we conduct our space program in plain view of everyone: this was a direct challenge to the Soviets, where everything was shrouded in secrecy.
Notice also the words he speaks to the schoolchildren. That’s one of the things that made the loss of the Challenger have a dreamlike feel to it: we were sending a schoolteacher into space with the astronauts, Christa McAuliffe. She was going to teach classes from outer space. What a wonderful gift to our kids, I’m thinking, how exciting for her, how exciting for them.
And then there was my partner walking into my office saying, “The Challenger just exploded.” Finding a radio, tuning in. Wanting to hear that they’d all somehow safely gotten out. Waiting and waiting, and thinking, gosh, if they don’t find them soon, they’re going to run out of air. Thinking about how my kids, the three we already had, were too young to remember this, that some day I would tell them about how we were sending a schoolteacher into space and she died. I realized that they would never be able to feel how sad the day was, really; that it would be just another historical datum for them. I wondered if there was a way to teach them about how sad it was. There wasn’t; there isn’t. You had to be there.
I went out in the early afternoon to buy the extra edition of the Rocky Mountain News from a boy. He wasn’t hollering, “Extra, extra, read all about it; space shuttle explodes” because he already had a line of customers, but I wondered if he wanted to holler that, because that’s just how it’s done, after all. Twenty-five cents, eight pages, a color photo of the explosion on the front page, photos of the looks of horror on the faces of those at Cape Canaveral, black and white, on the inside. No ads. As it should be. I’ve still got it. The pages are dry and brittle now, yellow, and the colors are faded. We had one more extra edition, on 9/11. There won’t be any more; the Internet has made them unnecessary.
They were fine, brave people, those astronauts. They slipped the surly bonds of earth, and touched the face of God. RIP.
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Pavel Blov