Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

36 years ago today, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 76 seconds after launch.

This was my first JFK moment.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...enger-explodes

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

I see.

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

I don’t mean to come across as insensitive. This was a disaster, I remember every thing about it. It’s just the 36yr thing. Bit of an odd anniversary to commemorate?

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

John Craven's Newsround broke the story :rofl:

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The bone china anniversary iirc...

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Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

What's a "JFK Moment" ?

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

Something where you remember where you are and what you were doing when it happens :shrug:

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

I agree it’s an odd anniversary to mark, but it was indeed also my first JFK moment … I walked in the door from school just minutes after it happened and heard all about it on John Craven’s Newsround.

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

I was watching the launch live on TV.

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

Don't forget it was NASA's day of rememberance on Thursday 27th Jan which remembers all 3 incidents. The Apollo 1 fire (Jan 27th 1967), Challenger (Jan 28th 1986) and Columbia (Feb 1st 2003).

It is always held on the last Thursday of January since 2004.

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

Wow, strange to think Columbia was almost 20 years ago now. I remember seeing that come on the news and thinking ‘oh no not again’. Statistically, the space shuttle, for all its remarkable innovation, was an absolute death trap and the chances of it killing you were uncomfortably high.

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

Oh, ok, not a JFK Moment for me then.
I vaguely remember seeing it on the news, but I would still have been at work when it happened.

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

Space Shuttle Challenger. Our 5 year old son was off school with mumps and I couldn't believe what I was seeing as I sat watching the TV with him.

My JFK moment was when JFK'death was announced on the radio.

I was 14 and had just called into a friends house on the way to a dance class. Got to class late and when we explained what we had heard at her house no one believed us until another late arrival came in with the same horrible news.

1963 -- no mobile phones or Google in those days and Transistor radios weren't that 'hip' as it was before pirate radio hit the scene.

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

2 JFK moments in a year. For both this and Chernobyl I was working in a butchers shop in Coventry. The news was on in the Shop when the shuttle exploded. Chernobyl, I remember because we still got snow in April and we had to bring the meat in because we were warned the snow was radioactive

Re: Space Shuttle Challenger 36 years later
 

Haha, heaven forbid!

Although not the Challenger - I'm too young - the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegration on return resonates as a memorable event in time.

The following proposed STS-400 (Endeavour) mission to rescue STS-125 (Atlantis) astronauts would have surely been defeated by capitalist ideals of the value of a handful of deaths and a shit ton of fuel. On a human level I didn't want to see STS-400 but it would have - if successful - represented (for me) the pinnacle of human achievement even twenty years later.