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15. I can't remember much of the coverage in the UK news, but think I heard about the explosion on John Craven's Newsround! If he was doing it that week, or at all by then.
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'Nother 12-year-old 6th-grader here. I got to school, walked into my Humanities Block classroom, and one of my classmates said "Did you hear? The space shuttle exploded!" and I said "No it didn't." with as much 'quit-yanking-my-chain' scorn as my shy pseudo-adolescent self could muster.
One of my close friends (who was in 9th grade at the time) was watching the launch live in her U.S. History class. She was a mess for days.
And I punched the first kid who told me the "What does NASA stand for?" joke.
BTW, Saltah'na, as far as "why" -- a young senator named J. Danforth Quayle, who was the head of the senate subcommittee overseeing NASA, decided to go with a different o-ring manufacturer who had been lobbying. See, they could make the o-rings more cheaply by making them in two pieces instead of one. And in the frigid weather that January, they shrank, and gapped, and one of them leaked when the fuel burned high enough to reach it, effectively turning a blowtorch onto the external tank. There were a lot of mistakes and errors of judgement, but for pity's sake, the guy with oversight over NASA NEEDS to be a rocket scientist!
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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Additional: I'm still pissed about being born too late to have been there for Gemini and Apollo -- or even Skylab. I was born the day after Nixon was pardoned.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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I'm sorry I missed that era, too. Although the undertones of the Cold War at its height I could do without.
I was born 16 days before Nixon's resignation (July 23, 1974). My mom was on leave from her job as a writer at the Washington Post. (I think it was the Post. Still significant even if it was another paper.) She said (jokingly, of course) that my birth made her miss the final days of the Watergate scandal.
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I was a full grown adult of 33 when it happened. Someone called and said there'd been and accident and I popped in a tape and recorded the first replay. I was stunned. I didn't much care for the shuttle. I thought it was a big glider. The cold war, if nothing else gave us inspiration to compete in space. (We had to beat those "commie" bastards to the moon). The Challeger tragedy aside from the obvious human loss, slow the impetus to "Boldly Go" into space. It was slowing already but Challenger gave people an excuse to spend money here on earth where "it will do some good". Guess it must have done a great deal of good because we obviously have no more poverty, crime, predjudice or anything else bad, right?
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