Do you remember where you were at this moment?

I was 10, and wouldn't be watching news broadcasts for another 2 years. But I vaguely remember hearing my parents talk about it.

I was too young on this one...

But 9/11 that one I know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVhhu5OjMf8

yup. middle school watching live. all the teachers were excited for teacher Christa Mcauliffe so there was weeks of build up. tvs in all the classrooms. Nasa stuff all over the school.

Reagan's Star Wars speech was a couple years earlier and the cold war exasperated things. Nasa and space superiority were big deals at the time.

the movie Space Camp was coming out. a movie about aspiring astronaut kids and their teacher being forced to launch after a malfunction during a booster simulation.

MTV used to use the space shuttle in their promotions and stopped because of the disaster. They also played Night Rangers song Goodbye as a tribute.

I was at home, caring for my young children. My dad called and told me that the Challenger had just exploded. I turned on the TV, and saw that for once, my dad wasn't exaggerating the situation. He was a very entertaining storyteller, and of course, loved to embellish his adventures. But this time he was spot on.

Oh God, I was an adult and on a road trip, and that day we had reservations on a deep cave tour. So we went from the bizarre and tragic happenings far above us in space, to the unearthly strangeness of being deep underground.

That was a memorably strange day.

I was in fifth grade and it was starting to snow pretty hard here in central Maine that day. We were all hoping that we'd be sent home early. It was less than an hour before lunch time when our teacher, Mr. Maxell, wheeled in a TV and turned it on without saying anything; acting uncharacteristically solemn.

The explosion had already happened at that point, and they were replaying the footage and discussing it on TV. We watched the TV coverage for about 20 minutes and then had a class discussion for maybe a half hour, which brought us to about lunch time (12:30). If they were going to send us home early due to the weather it would normally happen before lunch, and sure enough, the announcement came over the intercom that school was letting out early.

I played my usual after-school game of chess with Mr. Maxell and then walked home in a blizzard. During my walk home I was thinking about how it could have been Mr. Maxell on that shuttle, since he, along with thousands of other teachers across the country, had applied for the position that Christa McAuliffe was ultimately selected for.

I watched it on TV and noticed the capsule with the astronauts looked intact to me even though there was an explosion near it.

For days, the news and NASA repeated they died in an explosion, but I didn't believe that. It took a while, but they finally admitted the capsule was intact and the astronauts were alive when the impact of hitting the water is what killed them.

It was a reminder of how dangerous space travel is after most people had become complacent and that government thinks we'd can't handle the truth!