Thoughts on a day marking the loss of the Challenger

In the way that one generation has Pearl Harbor and the next generation has the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the generation that followed those has the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. It is a moment in history that a generation recalls with vivid horror.

Never before had our nation been attacked by an enemy as we were on Dec. 7, 1941, never had the assassination of a president been brought into American homes the way it was Nov. 22, 1963, and never before had a spacecraft carrying seven Americans toward the heavens exploded before our eyes as it did 25 years ago today.

Millions witnessed the disaster in real time, and many of those watching were students. What was supposed to put the Jan. 28, 1986, launch of the Challenger in the history books was its most famous crew member, Christa Corrigan McAuliffe, who won a competition and then trained assiduously to be the first teacher in space.

Among those watching were students at her Concord, N.H., high school, where students were wearing party hats and cheered and blew into noisemakers at lift off. Across the country, students in hundreds of other classrooms, including some in the Mahoning Valley, were watching the blastoff as part of the teacher-in-space curriculum.

But 73 seconds into the flight, cheers turned to stunned silence. And students who had been anticipating lessons in science, learned one of life’s hardest lessons.

In memoriam

The lives of seven American astronauts — Francis “Dick” Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka and Christa McAuliffe — were lost.

It was not the first time that American astronauts had died in the line of duty, and, regrettably, not the last.

Three Apollo 1 astronauts — Roger B. Chaffee, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom and Edward H. White II — died Jan. 27, 1967 in a fire on the launch pad while training.

Seven more — Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon — died when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003. Ramon was the first Israeli in space.

Seven other U.S. astronauts died in plane crashes between 1964 and 1991 either on training flights or while traveling for NASA. Over the years, civilian technicians and engineers lost their lives in accidents preparing rockets for various missions.

Those less known sacrifices still speak eloquently about the willingness of people to risk and even lose their lives in endeavors that they see as bigger than themselves.

A president’s response

President Ronald Reagan, who was to give his State of the Union address the night of the challenger explosion, instead spoke to the nation from the Oval Office at 5 p.m. Part of what he said was addressed to that generation that will never forget the day: “I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”

And so we have for another generation, though America now faces what is likely the last shuttle flight. The fleet is aged and the nation is reassessing its priorities in light of fiscal constraints unseen since the Great Depression and World War II.

Yet, perhaps one reason to mark anniversaries such as this — even painful anniversaries — is to ask ourselves if we are continuing to live up to the ideals and expectations of earlier generations.

By many measures, we are not, which is an entirely separate cause for sadness this day.