NASA sprang into action, showing young people science could be fun, using space as the carrot, communist invasion as the stick. As a result, millions of American children got their first taste of space - real space. Careers were launched and dreams brought into being, built on the foundation of science taught in classrooms, but for me these classes had the opposite effect. Real space wasn't spacey enough for me. As an ex-girlfriend would later put it, I was more in love with the idea than the reality.
Shuttle missions, which had once seemed like a magical, mysterious journeys became little more than routine, business-like affairs. There were no aliens, no anomalies and no rocket ship chases through the rings of Saturn. It would take years to even get to Saturn, I learned, and any "chasing" would be pretty long-term. The space I came to know, with its interminable distances and near-impossible living conditions, was not the space I wanted it to be. When I was young and dumb, flying in space sounded like the most exciting journey imaginable. As I grew older, it felt more like taking a Greyhound bus to nowhere. The stick-on stars dimmed. The dream diminished.
And then the shuttle blew up.
***
"Obviously a major malfunction."
- NASA Launch Control
My mother and father used to talk about where they were when The President of the United States, Mr. John F. Kennedy, was shot. They both lived in the Dallas area, but neither was in Dealey Plaza to watch his motorcade. Like most young people, they weren't interested in politics and probably didn't have much of an opinion of Mr. Kennedy, good or bad. But when he was shot, that was something worth paying attention to.
In those days, shooting a president, hell, shooting anyone, was almost unheard of. There just wasn't the same nonchalance about gun violence in 1963 as there is today. And the president ... he was respected, if not revered. Hurting him was hurting the country. Few people would have even considered it. But someone did consider it, and then pulled the trigger. Lives changed that day. Some say the fabric of our nation changed that day. Certainly the belief systems of a lot of young people who'd never thought such a thing possible changed that day. Perhaps not for the better.
The Challenger is to my generation what Kennedy's death was to my parents'. I remember where I was. I was in school, watching the launch on TV. There was a teacher on board the shuttle, and she was planning to add to the National Commission on Excellence's seemingly endless supply of "interesting," science-based educational opportunities. Which, to me, sounded like adding an extra circle to hell. I wasn't really paying attention. And then I was.
The shuttle took off just fine. My teachers had tears in their eyes. Perhaps they saw a shadow of their younger selves on that shuttle. Perhaps that was their dream. Perhaps they were just happy their profession was getting the attention it deserved.
The shuttle arced into the sky, rolled over and got the command to throttle up its engines. The shuttle's commander acknowledged the command and complied. And then his ship exploded, killing all six of his crew, himself and my dream.
