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Basil

Basil

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31 years ago today. I remember where I was when I heard the news. I was a 1st Lt in the AF stationed at the 1954th Radar Evaluation Squadron (RADES), Hill Air Force Base, UT. I was in the office when one of the other officers came in and said the Space Shuttle just exploded.


Challenger Crew.jpg
 
I was in my final year at University. As soon as the news broke our whole class (32 Aeronautical Engineers) skipped the rest of the days lectures and headed home to see the news coverage on the TV.

Its also only 1 day beyond the 50th aniversary of the Apollo 1 fire.
 
I was in my last year of elementary school. Lots of schools watched it live, but I don't remember anything like that at our school. We knew all about the Teacher In Space, and I remembered that Mrs. McAuliffe was just slightly younger than my mama. We were taken out of class and assembled in the gym. The head of the school talked briefly about what had happened, then we watched a recording of the news from earlier that day. Seems like my middle brother might have been home from school that day, because he remembered seeing Charles Kuralt reporting the launch and becoming distraught when it was plain things had gone badly wrong.
 
I was in elementary school in a small town in middle Georgia. I remember we had the day off of school because it was so unusually cold that day, in the single digits here that morning IIRC. Watched it happen live, as I've always been a science geek.

I recently watched a documentary on Carrol Spinney called "I Am Big Bird" about the puppeteer who brings Big Bird to life. He talked about being offered a ride in the shuttle by NASA as an attempt to get kids interested in the space program again. He was all set to go up, but got a call back from NASA saying that the Big Bird costume was too big to take up and that they were going to send a science teacher up in the spot instead.........
 
We were in a video rental store returning a Beta tape rental and saw it live on TV set up in the store. Went outside and could see the trails in the sky. Shocking, still.
 
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