20 years ago today...

[Kimmifunn]

OMG. Kindergarten. We were walking to Mrs. Brooks' class. We really had no idea. This wasn't much of an impact on little Kimmi, but I do remember us piling in by a tv. Probably not paying attention at all of course.

 

[audie]

OMG. Kindergarten. We were walking to Mrs. Brooks' class. We really had no idea. This wasn't much of an impact on little Kimmi, but I do remember us piling in by a tv. Probably not paying attention at all of course.

omg - kindergarten !!! i was in college then

 

[imasunbum]

OMG. Kindergarten. We were walking to Mrs. Brooks' class. We really had no idea. This wasn't much of an impact on little Kimmi, but I do remember us piling in by a tv. Probably not paying attention at all of course.

Kimmi you are sooooooooo young. OMG no wonder you have so much funn. When I was your age, I thought that my age now was olddddddddd. Funny thing, doesn't feel that way at all now. My mind is processing, I may be older, but I still know how to kick it. My daughter would get a kick out of and laugh, but then say please don't say that in front of my friends. :funn:

Enjoy it Kimmi - it doesn't take long for 20 years to pass.

 

[Rudyjohn]

We lived in the Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater area & my husband worked at Honeywell Defense on the Shuttle program. Sometimes they were invited to view a liftoff at the Cape in person. This time he stayed home to wallpaper our bedroom. He had the tv on watching the lift off. Within seconds, he knew something was terribly wrong. We felt the boom of the explosion as it rattled our sliding glass doors. We were 150 miles away.

 

[iwishiwasthere]

Horrors, he had to be glad he was wallpapering.

 

[Miss Kitty]

We lived in the Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater area & my husband worked at Honeywell Defense on the Shuttle program. Sometimes they were invited to view a liftoff at the Cape in person. This time he stayed home to wallpaper our bedroom. He had the tv on watching the lift off. Within seconds, he knew something was terribly wrong. We felt the boom of the explosion as it rattled our sliding glass doors. We were 150 miles away.

Unbelievable.

 

[Paula]

I was in graduate school driving back to class after an off-campus meeting with about 3 other students. When we got to class, we were clueless about what had happened, but the class was discussing the event and told us about it. Classes, of course, did not continue as usual that day. I've been watching the CNN special about Christa, the teacher who was on the shuttle. Very moving portrait of her.

There's also a teaching video that reenacts the teleconference in which NASA and Morton Thiokol (the company that made the ORings that failed and caused the failure) discusses whether to launch or not because they weren't sure the Orings would hold up in cold weather (it had never been tested). It's interesting to watch the dynamics and the two engineers trying to influence the group to not fly the shuttle. Clearly, it didn't work. I use the video in a course on team dynamics (it is used to illustrate groupthink and authority dynamics). Roger Boisjoly is one of the engineers who tried to stop the launch.

 

[Smiling JOe]

I remember walking to a common room in our school where there was a huge screen TV. We watched historical events such as the Space Shuttle taking off, so this time was no different, until we watched it explode. I felt a little bit in a daze, not too dissimiliar from the way I felt after seeing the jets slam into the WTC. It was a gloomy day for me.

 

[bsmart]

I remember walking to a common room in our school where there was a huge screen TV. We watched historical events such as the Space Shuttle taking off, so this time was no different, until we watched it explode. I felt a little bit in a daze, not too dissimiliar from the way I felt after seeing the jets slam into the WTC. It was a gloomy day for me.

I was 3 when the Challenger exploded, but as I hear my family members and my SOWAL friends talk about it, it seems like the feeling was similar to the way I felt seeing the events of 9/11 unfold as a 19 year old student at UGA.

 

[TooFarTampa]

We lived in the Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater area & my husband worked at Honeywell Defense on the Shuttle program. Sometimes they were invited to view a liftoff at the Cape in person. This time he stayed home to wallpaper our bedroom. He had the tv on watching the lift off. Within seconds, he knew something was terribly wrong. We felt the boom of the explosion as it rattled our sliding glass doors. We were 150 miles away.

Wow.

I was in high school in St. Pete. It was a small private school and we didn't have many TVs in the classroom at the time, but I remember hearing about it somehow -- maybe an announcement or something. The thing I remember most about that day, and I have thought of it many times, was a comment from a kid whose dad worked for Honeywell. He said something like, "think of all that money they lost." I yelled at him for being crass. I think that was the first time I ever yelled at someone other than my little brother.