Reporter's Notebook: Remembering Challenger 26 Years Later

It took a status update on Facebook to remind me of the heart-wrenching crash of the space shuttle Challenger 26 years ago today, Jan. 28.

In an instant I flashed back to my days as a reporter in Maryland, not far from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where I was sitting in front a television set, watching the liftoff alone.

Other reporters were out and about.

The editors were having a meeting.

Liftoffs, by then, had become tired news. As noted in an ABC News video report: “The truth is, most of us had missed it. We stopped watching shuttle launches. They weren’t news anymore.”

Twenty-six years ago, before Facebook, blogs, and cell phone text alerts, I sat there in an empty newsroom, jaw dropped, as I watched in astonishment the unimaginable. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, a trail of smoke gave testament to our worst fears realized, a hope turned into horror.

I interrupted the edtiors’ meeting to announce what had happened and in an instant it became what it hadn’t been before: big news.

“Get on the phone, drive out to Goddard,” my editor told me.

But in the days leading up to the launch, which had already made history as the first flight to carry into space a public school teacher, Christa McAuliffe, no one had bothered to ask for press credentials to witness the flight on site at Goddard.

And they weren’t about to open up access in the aftermath of disaster.

We learned what we never should have forgotten:  If it matters, it’s news.

This day mattered, causing a planet full of people, living in their local towns and homes, to reconsider just how awesome it is, this crowning achievement of space flight, only to realize, too, how fragile we are to the forces outside of ourselves, rooted as they somtimes are in flawed thinking, sloppy oversight, simple mistakes, callousness, haste and chance.

“We will never forget them," said then-President Reagan, drawing upon the poet John Gillespie Magee to help capture the sentiments of a nation in shock. "Nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey, and waved good-bye, and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth, to touch the face of God.’ ”

Twenty-six years later, as they have for years, the NASA family, during the last week of January, "honors those who have lost their lives carrying out our missions and pays tribute to their lives and memorines."

The so-called "Day of Remembrance" pays tribute to the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia crews, "as well as other members of the NASA family who died supporting NASA's mission of exploration."

As noted in the NASA remembrance video: "In the face of our greatest acoomplishments, it's easy to lose site of the fact that each time men and women board a spacecraft, their actions carry great risks, along with the opportunity for great discoveries and the chance to push the envelope of our human achievement."

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Post your thoughts about the Challenger, its crew and your remembrances in the comment box below.
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Challenger (STS-51 L) / Jan. 28, 1986

• Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, commander
• Michael J. Smith, pilot
• Judith A. Resnik, mission specialist 1
• Ellison s. Onizuka, mission specialist 2
• Ronald E. McNair, mission specialist 3
• Gregory B. Jarvis, 41, payload specialist 1
• Sharon "Christa" McAuliffe, payload specialist 2 (first teacher to fly in space)

Apollo 1 (AS-204) / Jan. 27, 1967

• Virgil "Gus" Grissom, commander
• Edward White, command pilot
• Roger Chaffee, pilot

Columbia (STS-107) / Feb. 1, 2003

• Rick D. Husband, commander
• William C. McCool, pilot
• Michael P. Anderson, payload commander
• David M. Brown, mission specialist 1
• Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist 2
• Laurel Clark, mission specialist 3
• Ilan Ramon, payload specialist 1