How are you supposed to react when you watch another space shuttle disintegrate before your eyes? I can remember when it happened in January (28th I believe?) of '86. I was sitting in Mrs. Lucas' college prep junior english class (we were not one of the schools that gathered all of our students to watch the first teacher go into space and all that) and she came in and told us... and I was sitting there, waiting for the punchline... I was so sure she was making a joke or something... a couple seconds later, I realized there wasn't going to be a punchline and that she wasn't joking about anything... I can remember coming home and throwing on W.A.S.P.'s "The Last Command" and just blaring it in my room as loud as I possibly could, trying to pound the thoughts out of my head. Like every child probably on the face of the planet, I wanted to see the earth from the moon, be the first man to step foot on Mars, live on a space station... my brother and I flew Testors rockets, water rockets, built rockets and space shuttles out of Legos (and pseudo-Legos) in the '70s... Yeah, Star Trek was humorously cool in its fictionalized, Shatner-ized kind of way, but real outer space was even cooler. Every time I watched a launch or landing or even saw a picture of a space shuttle after that day, I always thought of the Challenger, without exception... in the countless shuttle missions I would see in the years to come, I would never forget about the weird shit I saw and felt in January of '86... Things happen from time to time that bring back old memories - some good, some not-so-good - sometimes faint, sometimes in floods...
So what do you say? What can you say? I couldn't begin to know. To the families, friends, workers, aspiring astronauts... I am sorry...