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January 28, 2006

Twenty Years Ago Today

The loss of Challenger and her crew.

As I read through this chronology of events from that day, I can still hear with absolute clarity the voices of ground control and Commander Dick Scobee...

Covey: "Challenger, go at throttle up."

Scobee: "Roger, go at throttle up."

And then it was gone. A huge white cloud; a rain of tumbling debris; and two renegade boosters flying wherever physics took them.

But, the school day had to continue, and so it did... although I'm pretty sure I didn't pay much attention. I was in 8th grade at the time, and the Space Shuttle had been a deep interest of mine (I still have all of the slides I made for a 6th grade presentation on the wonder of it all).

I spent the rest of the day and evening in front of the television, watching the Big Three anchormen pointing at scale models of what used to be Challenger. Here's what we think went wrong. Here's how it unfolded. Here's how they died.

And we know the rest. We know how the investigations turned out. We know how NASA's flawed policies and culture created an environment in which this could occur. We know it wasn't simply an unavoidable accident, and certainly wasn't an intentional act, instead residing in a tragic place somewhere between the two.

But no matter.

Today should be about remembering and honoring the seven crew members: their dedication, their passion, and their sacrifice. As then President Ronald Reagan said:

The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

And through continued Shuttle missions, the International Space Station, and all the way to our nascent private-enterprise efforts to reach space, indeed we have.