mcgrew's Journal: January 28, 1986

It was the middle of a pretty bad recession, and I was out looking for work. Leila was six months old, and Patty wouldn't be born for another year. We had moved back to Illinois from Florida to be closer to family, and had been staying in Evil-X's sister's attic in Cahokia. The three of us and our cat had traveled to Springfield for a visit to my dad, who had told me that the recession hadn't hit Springfield very hard and there was work there.

It was a cold winter if I remember correctly. We'd gotten to Cahokia in November, and were greeted by six inches of snow. We hadn't seen snow in five years. There was perhaps eight inches on the ground in Springfield that day. The cold had reached all the way down to our previous home, where we'd watched every single shuttle launch up to then, which you could see all over Florida. Many times we'd go out to the cape, watch the shuttles lifting off, then we'd go to the beach. This was the first shuttle launch I didn't see live, even live on TV.

We'd camped out in Dad's family room for a few days. I pulled the car into the driveway and went inside. Everyone was gathered around the TV. My dad seemed especially shaken. "It blew up!" he said as I came in.

"What blew up?"

"The space shuttle! It blew up!" I watched the screen and they reran the explosion, which the news showed over and over again all day long, much like they showed the WTC falling all day long when that catastrophe happened. The next thing Dad said made me understand why he was so rattled. It wasn't the loss of life before everyone's eyes, it was my alleged prescience. "How did you know that was going to happen?" he asked.

"What do you mean? I replied, puzzled.

"You drew pictures of that when you were a kid, and the pictures looked just like that!

But it hadn't been prescience, it had been simply a young nerd's imagination. No travel was safe, and space travel would surely have accidents and catastrophes, the ten year old me had surmised. And as I'd studied up on how rockets worked, it wasn't hard to imagine what one would look like when it blew up. I explained it to him, and he seemed dubious.

Kibbles the Cat didn't care, she was too busy teasing my stepmother's dog. Leila didn't care either, she just wanted a clean diaper and a bottle.

The cold weather and NASA bureaucrats who ignored the engineers had killed those astronauts. The engineers had cautioned against launch in the freezing cold, which would surely play havok with something. It did. The O-rings had frozen, and the lack of elasticity had allowed hydrogen to escape, which caused the explosion. The astronauts likely didn't just not know what had hit them, they were probably dead before they realized anything was even wrong.

That weekend we drove back down to Cahokia to get our stuff from the attic, as Evil-X had found a job in Springfield as a waitress. We visited my best friend, Jim Dawson, who would die of a heart attack five years later. Jim was full of jokes. "What was the last thing Christa McAuliffe said to her husband? 'You feed the dogs, I'll feed the fish'."

Here are a few links to the STS-51-L tragedy:
The Crew of the Challenger Shuttle Mission in 1986
Chapters III and IV of "Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident," U.S. Government Printing Office : 1986 0 -157-336.)
Wikipedia article
NASA mission archives
NASA image library