"The Challenger just blew up..."

Twenty-five years ago today, I was sitting in Mrs. Betty Hoyer's fourth grade class at Baldwin Elementary School in Paragould, Arkansas.

The date was January 28, 1986. At some point around 11 a.m., a teacher knocked on the door and Mrs. Hoyer answered. The teacher had tears in her eyes. She told us to turn on the classroom television, saying, "The Challenger just blew up."

For what seemed like the rest of the day, we watched TV news coverage of the disaster. I can remember how surreal it all seemed. I was 9 years old, and I had been reading about the upcoming Challenger flight in the Weekly Reader that our school distributed each week. The Challenger flight was a big deal for kids at the time, because one of the astronauts was to be Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who was going to teach lessons from orbit via satellite link.

In an e-mail earlier today, my brother remarked that this was the most defining cultural moment of our generation. I think that's right. It might not quite compare to the Baby Boomers' experience of President John F. Kennedy's assassination as a singular event, or the Boomers' larger experience of the Vietnam War. And it didn't cause the kind of seismic political changes as the pivotal moment of the Millennial Generation's  childhood - the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. For Generation X though, it was a moment when innocence was lost. The relative comfort of growing up in the America of the 1970s and 80s gave us all a false sense of security that was reinforced by our nation's preeminent status around the world. The Cold War was still going on, but for a generation that never knew a military draft and enjoyed broad economic and political stability, that seemed like a distant threat at best. Then a rocket ship tumbled from the sky, and all of a sudden invincibility was replaced by uncertainty.

Speaking to the nation in a speech later the same day, President Ronald Reagan said, "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

Reagan's eloquent statement was a paraphrase from the poem, "High Flight," written by American aviator John Gillespie Magee, Jr., who was killed while flying with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. The poem is beautiful and bears quoting in full on this tragic anniversary:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark nor even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

CNN has a page devoted to remembering the Challenger anniversary, which you can access at this link. And Weekly Reader - which is still being published for schoolchildren - printed an article for its younger readers that can be read here.