"Lock the doors and close the blinds -- we're going for a ride..."

About a year ago I finished my masterpiece -- Twenty Years of Mindsay: 1985-2005 chronicling my 20 years of blogging on Mindsay since I was 12. 

A lot of the stuff I included isn't, per se, made up. It's based on fact and emotion of what I was feeling at the time. (Okay. Some of it is completely made up. I didn't invent "spinner rims" or almost hook up with singer/songwriter Lisa Loeb.)  But some of it truly reflects what happened to me back then.

One of those entries is chronicled in Year Two -- which, although I mislabeled as occurring on January 28 instead of January 27, talks about what transpired at school on the day that the Challenger disaster occurred.  To summarize: we had heard about it as news rippled around the school during lunchtime. Some of us rushed over to the library / media center where all the local news stations were covering it. I brought a TV / VCR cart down to our class and got my foot stuck in the elevator door, thus spraining it and putting me on crutches for a few weeks.  That's all completely true.

My emotions displayed in that entry were genuine. It was a tragic loss -- people didn't know how to process something like this.  When the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry only a few years ago, the first instict was: "Could this be a terror attack?" In fact, the news made it quite clear from the beginning that it was not.  back in 1986 with the Challenger this was not even something which crossed Americans' minds.

NBC News's James Oberg wrote an interesting piece which can be found on the MSNBC website at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/. He talks about the twentieth anniversary of the Challenger disaster -- but focuses on seven "myths" of the disaster which have lived on through people's recollections and internet forums.  The myths he lists are:

1. Millions of television viewers were horrified to watch the events unfold -- live.
2. Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.
3. The crew on-board died instantly
4. The faulty design of the booster rockets was implemented due to political meddling.
5. NASA used a weaker sealant than previously used due to environmental regulations.
6. Political pressure forced the launch -- even though there were hazardous conditions.
7. NASA claimed that this was an inevitable disaster which helps to pave the path of future progress.

Read the article for some great information of which  I wasn't originally aware.  I'm going to discuss #1 for a moment.

I didn't watch it live. I watched it once news had circulated around the school -- which was quite a bit of time after the TV news cut back into regular broadcasting after the launch had finished. CNN apparently was showing the launch live, but keep in mind that this was 1986 -- a time that most folks didn't have access to CNN. Our school certainly didn't -- we had a satelite dish which only received downlink foreign programming on two channels.

Certainly the televisions strapped onto a huge, metal cart with a VCR tucked under them didn't get CNN. But they received the local VHF channels in the DC area which were all running coverage after the fact.

I find it fascinating, however, that so many people remember watching it "live." Perhaps their memories are selective and round up to the nearest experience. I didn't watch the launch and the 73 seconds of aftermath live -- but I watched the coverage of the aftermath live.  Many of us did. And as new information came in, we watched it on the local news and read it in the local papers. Much in the same way that people were tuning into their radios and televisions when they had heard that Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had been shot. This NASA launch was a huge deal -- several launches had already occurred throughout the five year span of the Shuttle program.

It brings back memories of September 11 -- which had been a different situation completely. Nobody had been looking into the sky that morning when one plane hit the tower. But the world was watching when the other plane hit. It likely was what Osama bin Laden and Al Queida was counting on. It's a common tactic used by terrorist -- make sure the cameras are rolling and the world is watching.

In any case, we still remember those that were lost on that day -- and we think of the families and communities that surround them.