
Were you watching on TV when Challenger broke up? - DavidWanjiru
I&#x27;ve just watched footage of the Challenger space shuttle breaking up in this documentary [0], and although I knew what happened, I&#x27;ve instinctively reacted like I didn&#x27;t know it was going to happen. You know how they show replays of a sports person getting a nasty injury in slow motion and you react now that you&#x27;re seeing it properly? Like that.<p>So, if I&#x27;m reacting like that, I can only imagine what it was like for people watching it live. It must have been horrible. Did you watch it happen?<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AGh9eg2kNgc
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brudgers
Growing up in Orlando, watching a shuttle launch was something we did outside.
I think the only one I watched on TV was a day junior year we skipped high
school and Phil drove to Titusville. He had a 72 Impala hardtop with the small
block 400. We hung out in his sister's apartment drinking beer and watching
the broadcast of Shuttle on the pad until just after lift-off. Then we stepped
out onto the back balcony and there it was just a few miles away coming up
over the landscape.

I was living in Gainesville (you can't usually see anything from there) and
sitting in a morning sociology class when Challenger launched. I came back
from class, flipped on the TV and there was Dan Rather and a talking head with
a shuttle model. The thing I remember most was going to statistics class that
afternoon and some student saying they couldn't believe it had happened and
asking if it really had. I was kinda' stunned because I figured any
intelligent educated person would know that blowing up is something rockets
tend to do. Of course the big deficiency was in my model of other minds.

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FiatLuxDave
I watched it live (not on TV) in the sky from the playground of Ocean Breeze
Elementary, about 20 miles south of the Cape. It was my 12th birthday.

It took a few minutes for it to sink in that it had exploded. We knew
something was wrong, but the teachers wouldn't confirm that it had exploded -
I think they didn't want to deal with a bunch of crying kids. We observed a
lot of debris falling from the explosion. Some of the kids in my class
speculated which of the pieces was the escape pod. We presumed that there had
to be one.

Then we went inside and turned on the TV, where they just showed it blowing up
over and over. We were all kind of numb. A couple of kids were worried about
their parents losing their jobs. I remember kids at lunch making the joke,
"what does NASA stand for? - need another seven astronauts!".

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mindcrime
I was watching live when it happened. I remember I had stayed home from school
that day for some reason, and I lying in bed watching the launch when it
happened. I don't remember much about how I felt though. I think maybe I
didn't know how _to_ feel, as I was pretty young (13 or so) at the time and
had never experienced anything quite like that before.

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therealgimli
I was in elementary school at the time. Many of the teachers brought TVs into
their classrooms to show the launch. It was horrifying to watch the shuttle
disaster like that-- from what was supposed to be a celebratory, fun thing to
watching a live tragedy.

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jayrox
This happened on my 3rd birthday. Can't say I remember exactly what I was
doing at the time but I've heard my parents talk about seeing it on TV.

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FroshKiller
I wasn't watching live, but I want to say we watched on the six o'clock news
that night. I was four at the time.

