from Hacker News

Were you watching on TV when Challenger broke up?

by DavidWanjiru on 12/16/16, 11:43 AM with 6 comments

I've just watched footage of the Challenger space shuttle breaking up in this documentary [0], and although I knew what happened, I've instinctively reacted like I didn't know it was going to happen. You know how they show replays of a sports person getting a nasty injury in slow motion and you react now that you're seeing it properly? Like that.

So, if I'm reacting like that, I can only imagine what it was like for people watching it live. It must have been horrible. Did you watch it happen?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGh9eg2kNgc

  • by brudgers on 12/16/16, 2:09 PM

    Growing up in Orlando, watching a shuttle launch was something we did outside. I think the only one I watched on TV was a day junior year we skipped high school and Phil drove to Titusville. He had a 72 Impala hardtop with the small block 400. We hung out in his sister's apartment drinking beer and watching the broadcast of Shuttle on the pad until just after lift-off. Then we stepped out onto the back balcony and there it was just a few miles away coming up over the landscape.

    I was living in Gainesville (you can't usually see anything from there) and sitting in a morning sociology class when Challenger launched. I came back from class, flipped on the TV and there was Dan Rather and a talking head with a shuttle model. The thing I remember most was going to statistics class that afternoon and some student saying they couldn't believe it had happened and asking if it really had. I was kinda' stunned because I figured any intelligent educated person would know that blowing up is something rockets tend to do. Of course the big deficiency was in my model of other minds.

  • by FiatLuxDave on 12/16/16, 8:47 PM

    I watched it live (not on TV) in the sky from the playground of Ocean Breeze Elementary, about 20 miles south of the Cape. It was my 12th birthday.

    It took a few minutes for it to sink in that it had exploded. We knew something was wrong, but the teachers wouldn't confirm that it had exploded - I think they didn't want to deal with a bunch of crying kids. We observed a lot of debris falling from the explosion. Some of the kids in my class speculated which of the pieces was the escape pod. We presumed that there had to be one.

    Then we went inside and turned on the TV, where they just showed it blowing up over and over. We were all kind of numb. A couple of kids were worried about their parents losing their jobs. I remember kids at lunch making the joke, "what does NASA stand for? - need another seven astronauts!".

  • by mindcrime on 12/16/16, 12:23 PM

    I was watching live when it happened. I remember I had stayed home from school that day for some reason, and I lying in bed watching the launch when it happened. I don't remember much about how I felt though. I think maybe I didn't know how to feel, as I was pretty young (13 or so) at the time and had never experienced anything quite like that before.

  • by therealgimli on 12/16/16, 12:32 PM

    I was in elementary school at the time. Many of the teachers brought TVs into their classrooms to show the launch. It was horrifying to watch the shuttle disaster like that-- from what was supposed to be a celebratory, fun thing to watching a live tragedy.

  • by jayrox on 12/16/16, 2:53 PM

    This happened on my 3rd birthday. Can't say I remember exactly what I was doing at the time but I've heard my parents talk about seeing it on TV.

  • by FroshKiller on 12/16/16, 12:19 PM

    I wasn't watching live, but I want to say we watched on the six o'clock news that night. I was four at the time.