Its been 35 years, where were you?

In reply to KyAllroad (Jeremy) (Forum Supporter) :

Damn true, and many of them would be enough to end careers these days if writen down, facepaged or twatterd out.

Standing in the student union at Ohio State being late for a freshman comp class just so I could watch the launch. Porbably about 40 or 50 people actively watching, many passing through. I had never heard the place so quiet. 

I walked into class about 20 minutes late, prof giving me the stink eye. Told the crowd of about 40 people what happened. The teacher left and rolled a cart with a 25" TV on it back into the room. The rest of the class ended up to be a history lesson in real time.

Sitting in 3rd grade with Sister Evelyn.  It went boom and she quietly got up, turned the tv off, rolled it to the corner and just started teaching. Not a word was said as we sat there in shock.  This was the excitement over the first female teacher sent into space for the whole school.

I was a freshman at Idaho.  Honestly don't remember it- was in class for sure, and maybe watched the news in the evening.

I know my dad was home sick from work to see it live.

IIRC, the only shuttle launch I saw live was the first one, and I remember watching the landing of that, too.  That would be 8th grade. 

Funny, I remember getting the news about Columbia's break up more than Challenger.  That was at a car event. 

 I was also in 5th grade, seems like a lot of us here are the same age. I remember watching the launch in class. The teacher has wheeled an old TV in on an AV cart. I don’t remember hearing much, probably couidn’t hear the weak speaker across the classroom. I remeber it took everyone a minute to figure out what was happening. By that time the teacher had turned off and wheeled away the T.V. and moved on to something else like nothing happened. 

In reply to jharry3 :

And Politicians are still over-ruling engineers and scientists who speak in facts.

While I’d love to debate you on the subject, this isn’t the place, and that comment added nothing to this discusson. 

I was in HS at the time but stayed home to watch the launch. I watched 90% of the launches. Horrified.

I try to watch all of the SpaceX launches as well.

I would volunteer for a one way trip to settle Mars...before they finished the sentence. 

Even sadder, most of the crew on board only perished when they hit the water.  I think a couple maybe died on decent with heart failure.  I remember going to my dad's office once and Enterprise was in the back of the building.  They were working on heat shield designs possibly.  Very cool up close, and much bigger in person than you might imagine.  

In reply to racerdave600 :

This was the first news story I remember following in depth, picking up every newspaper and magazine I could find. It was so unsettling to learn a lot of details like that. 

Fixing Volvos at Automobil Technic.  Heard about it on the radio, didn't see it until the news that evening.

It hit me hard for several reasons. 
 

I grew up in central Florida. My dad was hugely interested in the space program and did some art work for NASA during the Mercury program. Later he would paint portraits of the original seven astronauts. I still have the portrait of John Glenn. 
 

The first time I was introduced to an adult and prompted to shake hands, was meeting Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper. I don't think I was older than 6. 

The day of the Challenger disaster I was at Showplace Farm in central NJ. I didn't know it yet, but that was going to be my last year training horses.

One of the grooms told me what happened. I turned my horse loose in his stall and went to the track kitchen to watch some of the coverage. I remember feeling especially homesick for Florida, and it felt so strange that no one else there seemed to care much at all. 

Edit: I finished this, then read it to my wife. I told her how I was in tears, and everyone else there was hardly glancing at the TV, and now I'm crying. 

I was in kindergarten at the time. I remember watching it, but I didn't really understand what was going on at the time.

But the morning is still burned in my memory.

High school.  I remember hearing about it, but we rarely watched the shuttle launches, so we didn't see it live. Few  classrooms had a TV.

I was 2, so probably pooping myself, getting into trouble, sleeping, or all of the above.

Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) said:

For those who'd like to know more about how it all happened, Netflix has a really good doc called "Challenger: The Final Flight". Goes into some detail about all the astronauts, including McAulliffe, how she was chosen, etc. And a lot about Morton Thiokol, who made the O-ring that failed. A lot of factors went into that failure, but the short version is that NASA had grown complacent and cocky.

What I've heard is that the burecrats had taken over and were now in charge of engineering and science based decisions.

Most of the posts above make me feel real old.  I was 36 sitting in a sportsbar with lots of TV screens.  Had left the office with some friends just to catch the launch.

Sat there in shock hoping for some miracle and knowing it wasn't possible.

Still being carried around with my dad, he hadn't met my mom yet.

Working at the car repair shop, my 3rd job outta high-school. The owner was a shiny happy person who made some manner of "ha ha serves em right" comment. I quit shortly thereafter and it was only with considerable self control that his business didn't burn to the ground. 

I should add this.

My wife has a very good friend from her hometown that was hired to work on the recovery soon after finishing school. He spent an entire year watching every video, over and over in order to track the trajectory of all of the pieces. They almost recovered everything. 
 

I believe he has some PTSD from that.

In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :

I don't see how you could do that job with getting some sort of trauma. 

Watched it in the classroom.

I'm with Stampie... I recall it being Elementary school, but it would have been 6th grade.

I do recall the black and white TV hanging in the corner of the classroom.  They had the volume knob that you pulled to turn it on and teachers used the rubber-tipped chalkboard pointer sticks to operate them.  I think we continued to watch to get the story.  My brain remembers watching for a long time while the talking heads filled the time with "we don't have confirmation..." and "it appears as if something may have happened...." because NASA wouldn't say anything.

I also remember later finding out about the faulty O-ring and learning that my cousin worked for Morton Thiokol who was a contractor involved in making the O-ring that failed causing the explosion.  The company started getting threatening calls so they locked down and sent everyone home.  He was pretty traumatized... both because he was afraid of retribution and because he felt partly responsible (even though he didn't work on that particular project... he was an accountant)

I was on a field exercise at Fort Hood, Texas, with the 2nd Armored Division.

I had just signed in to Fort Eustis, VA to attend an advanced school in the army between my 4th and 5th duty station and was shopping for a TV in Newport News and watched it on a row of TV's in the store.

Kindergarten home from school at my grandparents, possibly sick? I remember it very very clearly. I had just moved off of Air Force base and had a love of flight and all things space. I remember it was a big deal to me. 
I only leaned about the crew dying on water impact a couple of years ago. I couldn't sleep for a few days after reading that. 

If you really want to know what happened, and how it happened, read Richard Feynman's report.  For those who don't know Feynman is the quintessential scientists scientist and was on the Rogers Challenger Investigation Committee, although there are other members of that committee who really wish he wasn't.

https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt

Rogers didn't want Feynman's investigation to be included in the report, but he was able to get it added as an appendix.  In reality, it was the only real investigation done solely on a scientific basis.

Amazingly, there are still people that were involved in the decision to ignore the engineers and launch anyway that say that they made the right decision and wouldn't change a thing.

I was in elementary school.  There was a TV set up in the library so we could watch during lunch. It was too cold to go outside so a lot of us were in there.  Oddly enough I had walked away just before the explosion. Some of the other kids told me about it later and I did not believe them at first....