I had moved to Florida the year before and will never forget where I was when space shuttle OV-099 exploded. Had planned to go to the Cape but the launch was scrubbed on Super Bowl Sunday. Then again on Monday, and had to work Tuesday. Remember where you were?

Just finished watching the Netflix series ‘Challenger: the final flight’ - poignant and powerful, and highly recommended.

Always thought Morton Thiokol was the villain, but perhaps it was the arrogance of NASA. Never ever should’ve launched with 22° weather the night before.

Probably the most powerful ‘where were you’ moment for me prior to 9/11.
It’s a worthy watch, God bless the crew and their families.

 

Challenger and Columbia were both "let's not listen to the engineers."

 

I think I still have a newspaper stored away somewhere from the day after with the headlines of the tragedy. I was in the Naval Shipyards in Portsmouth, NH at the time. Having lunch on the living barge. The TV was on in the dining area and we were all watching the liftoff. I know it took off just after 11:30 because that's when we all broke for lunch. We got our food, sat down, and they lifted off very shortly after that. They made a big deal of it around there because of the teacher, Christa McAuliffe -who was from NH- being on board. So they televised it there. I think it was to the point at that time that shuttle launches were "common" and no longer made them a national event and wasn't widely covered on TV. We were watching it go and then BOOM! Smoke trails in all sorts of directions. The whole place gasped in unison, so it seemed. I can't even remember what I had for lunch that day, it was a terrible day in history.

Ironically, soon after I got to my first ship in the Philadelphia Shipyard, I recall the President (Reagan) getting shot, and then a couple weeks later, we watched the Columbia take off at lunch time for the first ever space shuttle launch, which landed a couple days later. That was in April, 1981. Later that fall, when I went to Nuclear Power School in Orlando, FL we watched from the school's courtyard as they launched Columbia from Kennedy.

Then we watched one from the top of the submarine I was on a few miles off the coast of Florida sometime in April, 1984. THAT was pretty cool to watch one from the ocean view. I think that was the Challenger.