starkat wrote:We're coming up on three anniversaries for NASA.
Jan 27, 1967 - Apollo 1
Jan 28, 1986 - Challenger
Feb 1, 2003 - Columbia
For some reason I don't remember Apollo 1, though I remember some other big historical events from either before (JFK) or after (MLK and Bobby Kennedy).
Challenger and Columbia, though, I remember vividly. I didn't see either one live. I was at work for Challenger, with a local music radio station on in the background, and they broke in with the news. By the time I got home from work it was all over the TV stations, but all they could really do was show replays and speculate as to cause.
Incidentally, the 1986 calendar is identical to the 2014 one, so both years the State of the Union address would come on the 28th. As I recall there was some brief discussion in 1986 that President Reagan should give the Address to show the country continued on despite the morning's tragedy, but this quickly changed once people realized the impact seeing the shuttle explode had on Americans. So the State of the Union was delayed, and that evening President Reagan instead honored the Challenger Seven in this speech, which ended with a quotation from ‘High Flight’ by John Gillespie Magee: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.'"