[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]
On why we were so unprepared for disaster, and what the horrifying moment meant.
As I wrote in Monday’s post, there’s a significant difference between early space program disasters like the Apollo 1 fire or Apollo 13’s manifold issues and what happened on the morning of January 28th, 1986. Apollo 1 was to be the first manned mission of its type for the U.S. space program, and Apollo 13 was only three years later, very much still in the program’s infancy. By comparison, the Challenger’s 1986 mission, dubbed STS-51-L, was to have been the 25th Space Shuttle flight since the program’s launch in 1981, and the 10th for Challenger alone. Both the space program overall and the Space Shuttle missions specifically had become well-oiled and predictable machines—indeed, so confident were the NASA engineers in the Space Shuttle program that, after initially featuring ejection seats and pressure suits for the astronauts on the two-person test flights, they decided not to include any such escape mechanisms on the operational flights.
While of course the presence on the shuttle of Teacher in Space Project selectee Christa McAuliffe, about whose inspiring story and voice I wrote in yesterday’s post, had a lot to do with it, I have to think that this level of earned confidence in the Space Shuttle program was likewise a factor in NASA’s decision to not only broadcast the Challenger’s launch live, but also and especially to show it to millions of children in classrooms around the country (or at least in the more eastern time zones, as the 11:30 am launch time was a bit too early for it to be shown on the West Coast). (Another factor, and one I should have mentioned in yesterday’s post so I wanted to make sure to do so here, was the presence of another groundbreaking and inspiring astronaut, Ronald E. McNair, one of the first three Black astronauts and the second to go to space when he did so for the first time on 1984’s STS-41B shuttle mission.) (Too many parentheses, I know, but another potential factor, especially for conspiracy-minded folks, was President Reagan’s scheduled State of the Union address on the evening of January 28th, during which he planned to talk about the shuttle launch.)
Reagan ended up using that evening time slot to address the tragedy instead, perhaps hoping to provide some context for those millions of children who had watched the explosion live. But according to a long-term psychiatric study of a number of those kids, one eventually published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in October 1999, those who watched the launch did display at least some symptoms of what came to be known (thanks in part to this groundbreaking study) as distant-traumatic effects, a subcategory of PTSD. And as one of those kids, and one who distinctly remembers not only watching the launch and explosion on the small TV in the office of the large man who taught me to swim in the Charlottesville public schools, but also and especially the unexpected, unusual, and lingering feelings the experience created in me, I would have to agree. Whatever the factors involved in broadcasting this launch live, the choice to do so, coupled with a tragedy that no one could have predicted (although, as I’ll discuss tomorrow, some did worry about), was even more momentous than the explosion itself.
Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?
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