I was not aware the 20th anniversary of the first Shuttle disaster was upon us, but indeed it was January 28th of 2006. I am not exactly the most up-to-date person to begin with, as I find most news reports to be insultingly stupid and devoid of any real content, and you couple my lack of interest in the news with the fact that I am rarely exposed to news on the weekend and I can understand why it snuck up on me. I didn't even know until I saw several m33 to news stories in the RSS feeds I read at work.
One of the stories had a 7-point checklist of myths surrounding the mission disaster, and I was sort of poked in the side by the first myth: people say they saw the shuttle explode live on TV, but the reality is almost no one did. Among the reasons this is a "myth" is that the shit went down at about 11:30AM EST, which makes it less likely a person would see it than if it had been televised in the afternoon. What tends to potentially confuse people who are trying to remember this event from 20 years ago is the fact that is was all over the news once it happened, so everybody did get to see the PRERECORDED "live" footage. Another reason it is generally considered a myth is that this barely predates the massive explosion of dedicated news networks, and at the time the only way you could see the Shuttle liftoff was either to be in a school (with their own satellite dish) that monitored the NASA television network, or if you happened to be in a big enough city that you could get the new news network called "Cable News Network" (CNN for short) which was showing it because back then shuttle launches were still slightly novel and CNN had a hell of a lot less editorializing shows to fill up thier broadcast day so they still relied on actually REPORTING the news instead of hyping or creating it. According to the reports I have seen out for the 20th anniversary it would seem that networks and affiliates were not showing it... I guess the rating for reruns of "Gilligan's Island" were higher than the launch of a spacecraft.
Well, I saw it, live. It was one hell of a coindidence too. The launch occured a bit before 8:30AM PST and I was living in Santa Barbara at the time, so it was a bit early for me but for whatever reason my mom woke me up to see if I wanted to watch it. I guess the Shuttles were still novel enough for me that I cared, so I drug out of bed and dropped myself down in front of the TV which my mom already had tuned to CNN. I was barely focusing by the time it launched, and I remember thinking that this was another uneventful launch and pretty soon no one was going to care anymore because they were getting so routine.
Then we got about 75 seconds into the launch. I remember them talking about how the Shuttle was just about to throttle up the main booster all the way, and the announcers went silent in anticipation of the little puff of smoke that was expected. Well, we got more than a puff of smoke. The camera view kept cutting around like the image didn't make sense, and they kept looking at it from different perspectives. Right away I knew. Not because I had any expertise, but simply because I had never seen such a weird throttle-up and smoke. I took one look and said out loud "Something's wrong". Within seconds you could see the cloud expanding in a very non-standard way, and that was when I said to my mom "The shuttle just blew up", just before the NASA ground announcer started his now famous "uh, the data is wrong... we're not sure, but there appears to be a problem... controllers are checking their systems..." and I just kept chanting "it blew up, it's gone". As the solid boosters forked off and drew their now famous devil's horns I was looking at the debris starting to drop and realized that even if the Shuttle was intact it was about to hit the Atlantic Ocean at a very nasty speed and would doubtless kill everyone on board, if they were not already dead. I was stunned, and that doesn't happen often in my life. Within a few minutes I had a new thought; what would this do to the space program? Billy Bob Trailertrash has never been a fan of the space program, so a crisis like this could be all it takes for the fucking "Earth First" people to strongarm the country into severely curtailing the space program. Damned if I wasn't right, as it turned out.
Eventually we did relaunch the Shuttles, and things started getting back to normal with Shuttle launches. Then we lost another one on January 16th, 2003. SHIT! The latter one was especially annoying to me for two reasons; we all got advance warning it might happen since they knew they had problems, and this was the Shuttle I had personally seen land on the lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base so I felt a tie to it. Damn it, I have my own personal shaky Super-8 footage of the Columbia touching down, complete with an accidental commentary soundtrack provided by a nearby radio tuned to the NASA feed and picked up by the mike in the movie camera. Anyway, since there was the threat of problems I watched the news on TV, and sure enough the fucker broke up on reentry. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
On this unfortunately coincidental dual-anniversary I just wanted to take a moment to reflect. I have no profound observations, just a lot of sorrow and regret.
The Space Shuttle Challenger launching on her final mission, STS-107, January 28th of 1986
The Space Shuttle Columbia launching on her final mission, STS-51, January 16th of 2003
