Remembering Challenger

Sunday January 28th was the 21st aniversary of the Challenger disaster.
How many of us watched our dreams of space take a horrible new direction on that day?
Danny Miller at Huffington

When the space shuttle program began in the early 1980s, it seemed to reinvigorate the passion we all had for manned spaceflight. But this new era was no longer dependent on the pioneering astronauts of my youth. Who knew? Maybe one day soon regular people like me would be able to travel in space.

[...]

I can't remember a news event that affected me so viscerally before or since. I couldn't even imagine the grief that the families and friends of the astronauts experienced as they watched the live broadcast of their loved ones' completely unexpected and terribly violent deaths. Christa McAuliffe felt like a friend, a colleague, and I still had the image of her trusting, excited husband and young children in my head. That night, in a national address, Ronald Reagan expertly delivered the famous words that speechwriter Peggy Noonan had borrowed from a World War II-era sonnet. Despite my huge misgivings about Reagan's policies and political views, I believed his sincerity and emotion when he said:

"We will never forget 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."

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