I was in High School, eating lunch in the lunch room when my friend told me of the explosion. Couldn't believe it; then went to AP History and watched the whole thing unfold.

I was huge into the space program, and remembered a news story from months before about how an O-ring had nearly burnt through. I remember saying to my classmates at the time that that was the cause.

My even more vivid memory was of Reagan's speech. I was driving to a classmate's house after school. It was the first time I'd heard live rehetoric of such power. I remember thinking at the time how special and meaningful those words were.

To this day, it's one of my favorite pieces of presedential discourse.

I was down at the cafeteria in the basement of the insurance company I worked for. I had just paid for my lunch and was looking for a place to sit. Bonnie, one of my co-workers, came strolling by. "Did you hear about the Challenger? The whole thing exploded on lift-off."

I put my full tray on the belt and walked away - spent the rest of the day trying to get more information. We didn't have access to a TV. I was depressed for a week.

I was in class in high school, almost lunchtime when the announcement came over the public address system. When the bell rang, I went straight to the library's media room and turned on CNN. And then I cried.

--Notable that right now, I'm reading Richard Feynman's first-hand account of the Rogers Commission, in "What Do You Care What They Think?".

I was driving to a local mall...stopped at the light at Waller avenue and Harrodsburg road when WKQQ interrupted broadcasting and "Kruser" told us about the disaster. It was a bright day but alittle overcast but I turned the headlights on anyway. You could almost tell who was getting the information as more and more headlights came on.

I along with about 100 folks watched helplessly on the bank of TVs at Montgomery Ward department store.

I remembered thinking about the stories of the fire in the Gemini capsule, the narrowly averted disaster of Apollo 13, and the death of my own cousins who were caught up in a test firing accident of the solid rocket boosters.

I was, unfortunately, only 6 miles from the pad, watching from the top of a Cape Canaveral building. I was supporting the payload and was not required until an hour or so after launch. Somewhere I have a couple photos taken by my own hand. A tragic day.

I was in my Senior HS architecture class when the principal announced over the PA, the school rolled out TVs all over for the students to watch. Not a good way to miss classes that afternoon...still a sad day...

WPoS

I was in Biology Class in High School.

The class was interupted by a scream from down the hall and a commotion.

No announcement was made for over an hour, we found out what happened at lunch.

I went home that afternoon and watched the explosion about a hundred times.

I had always been a big fan of the space programme and on that day I did not think I could get more depressed. I was wrong, For the rest of the decade my heart sunk as one after another programme was delayed and finally cancelled by fussy little beauraucrats, as if the politicians were determined to make those 7 people die in vain.
No Space Station for 15 years and then a leaky compromised joke.

No return to the moon.
No missions to Mars.
No power from space.
No cities in space that had been all the rage when I was young

More money and people to launch the space shuttle into circles than it took to go to the moon 15+ years prior.

No vision, no hope, and an Air and Space Museum that stood as a graveyard to our ability to dream.

Then Columbia fell......

2 wrecked ships, 2 dead crews,

14 of our best splashed to the four winds while fussy, visionless little beauraucrats talked about the virtues of robots and the stupidity of sending people into that unforgiving void. 14 of our best who died trying to open the next home of humanity for people too narrowminded to see the hope, inspiration and opportunity it represents.

Now, for the first time in more than a decade I am hopefull that these fine people will not have died in vain. Between the Presidents CONSTELLATION initiative and most importantly, the entrepanuers and daredevils who with Spaceship One, Virgin galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, Davinci and all the rest are working to ensure that the new frontier is unlocked their memory will live on. The fussy visionless souless little beauraucrats will be deservedly forgotten except to be deride with the flat earthers and creationists, but in the not too distant future ships will open new frontiers. Ships with names like:
Grissom
White
Chaffee
Komarov
Dobrovolsky
Volkov
Patsayev
Scobee
Smith
Onizuka
Resnik
McNair
Jarvis
McCaulliffe
McCool
Husband
Anderson
Chawala
Brown
Clark
&Ramon.

We owe it to them and all Humanity to keep going.

I was in a small diner called Cosmos (of all things) and they had a radio on. The place was small, and full of people, and you could only hear about every 10th word. Suddenly, it got quieter, and quieter, and people were saying, "what? what did they say on the radio?" We left food and flooded into the parking lot, going for our cars. I sat there with about 10 strangers hanging in the car windows, listening to the radio. I remember thinking, "this is disbelief is how people must have felt when the Titanic went down." I drove back to work, and called my high school aged sister, who was home sick with the flu. When she answered, I could hear my grandmother weeping and saying "oh, those poor boys" in the background. That's when I knew. I think I got out "are they dead?" and my sister said, "none of them are going to come home, Cissy. It blew to pieces." A coworker's sister worked at NASA, and when Karen called her sister, she was crying.

I had heard all my life about people having a "flashbulb" memory of the moment they heard Kennedy was shot. The only times I've had a flashbulb memory that was shared by the country were Challenger, Oklahoma City, 9/11, and Columbia.

I was in 4th grade, home sick. My mom knew I liked space and she thought watching the Shuttle launch would cheer me up.

By the time my dad got home I'd seen it like 14 times becuase of replays on the news.

My oldest son was just 4 and a half months old on Jan 28, 1986. We were vacationing in Florida, on the Atlantic coast the previous July when the first Challenger launch for that mission was scrubbed. We were disappointed because we would have been able to see it from our hotel room balcony.
NBC did not carry the launch live, at least not in our local market. I was watching the local noonday news when they broke in with the announcement. The baby started to fuss, so I put him to my breast to keep him quiet while I sat stunned and motionless for at least an hour.

January 28 is a doubly sad day for my family ... it is also my brother's birthday. He would have been 39 today, but he was murdered 9 and a half years ago.

My mother was babysitting for a friend that day. Two smaller children and a toddler who mercifully was too young to understand what had just happened. But the two older ones had lots of questions. "What happened?" "Did they die?" How she kept it together for those kids, even through all the shock, still amazes me. That was the day my mother was transformed in my eyes, from "the woman who pesters me," into one of the strongest women I have ever known.

I was in my second year of law school. I remember blowing off classes so I could watch the hearings of the commission investigating the accident. They were a tragic lesson in bureacracy. I am too young to remember Kenndy's assasination, so 9/11 is about the only world event that exceeds the Challenger disaster in that mental "snapshot of time" aspect for me. Like 9/11, we had those incredible, humbling pictures. Maybe its also because it came second, but I think it is mostly the lack of pictures that makes Columbia's loss (though equally tragic) somehow less immediate and compelling.

Driving to work. I heard it on the car radio, walked into the building, up five flights of stairs, and into the door of the admin spaces. The F&B office had a TV on, and there were half-a-dozen people crammed into the 6×12 room watching CNN.

I was at work.
When my coworkers said the Challenger was lost, I said I had read about the Space Shuttle's vulnerabilities, and had always thought it was most likely to burn up on reentry due to broken thermal insulation.
They thought I was just evil for saying this.
Sadly, those people who were so shoked about the accident were the ones most uninformed about how dangerous spaceflight was, and is.

Unfortunately, my initial evaluation has turned out to be correct.

I remember the the day so well because it's the source of one of the biggest chills in my life. I was a first-year law student then and that morning my now-husband and I were watching the morning news shows, which were filled with happy-talk features about Christa McAuliffe. I suddenly had a strange feeling and remarked how they weren't thinking at all about how dangerous the mission was and what a risk she was taking. Later that morning at school my friend Judy and I saw an unusually large crowd around the TV in the student lounge. I knew something was wrong when I saw our Contracts professor among them. We walked up and saw the news about the shuttle explosion and my earlier sensation returned as a chill. I've always wondered if it was a premotion or not. At any rate, I've never looked at supposedly safe "celebrity" ventures the same way.

..call it what you will..I was working a graveyard shift,and for some reason... I woke up ..stummbled to the tv..watched the launch..then the aftermath..still dont remember what woke me,but I still get cold chills.."GO..FOR THROTTLE-UP"....

I got married on Jan 28, 1986, 6 hours after the disaster. We almost postpones the wedding, but my wife (then fiance) and I finally decided to go ahead anyway.

Bittersweet memories.

Yes, we're still married, with two wonderful boys.

I'm with Rob. To this day, when they do a launch, I always seem to hold my breath until after throttle up.

The best memory I have of the shuttle is watching a night launch from New Smyrna Beach. The night was so clear, we saw the glow from the launch pad, watched the shuttle climb, and saw the solid rocket boosters separate. Endeavour was a beautiful sight, and I hope she gets to fly again.

I was the conning officer onboard USS Portland (LSD-37), off the coast of Florida, waiting for the weather to improve so we could limp home to Norfolk (we'd lost a shaft for some reason). I'll never forget the look on CAPT Stan Gastar's face when he took the phone call from Radio, he looked at me and said "My God, the shuttle just blew up!.

I was on my way to the Jet propulsion Lab to talk to scientist / Engineers. Many years before, possibly 5 years before the first shuttle launch, I was talking to a McDonald Douglass Engineer about the shuttle program. He pointed out then that the Shuttle made little sense. Using a man rate craft to place satellites in orbit cost many times an expendable rocket, it was waste full as all the life support also was launched into orbit, and that they were never going to be able to turn around the space craft in the time frames NASA was claiming. Of course the political pressure to launch had some contribution to the disaster. I also read Dr. Feynman’s, from Cal Tech, response to being in the investigative committee. He admits to being lead around so that he would “discover” the problem every one wanted him to identify.
Today nothing has changed. NASA to be environmentally correct changed out the insulating material that used a CFC to a water based material that failed on launch and destroyed a section of the leading edge of the shuttle which resulted in a loss of life again. I wish we were getting more out or our manned space program but I have to admit to believing it is a tremendous waste of our money these days. Unmanned vehicles and craft are another matter.

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