Need Another Seven Astronauts

January 28, 1986. Everyone I knew growing up remembers where they were when the Challenger disintegrated some 70-odd seconds into its week-long mission. It's funny that no one remembers the date though. It's just not one of those dates that will live on in infamy. The tragedy was so specific, so captured in the footage of blue sky split by plumes of smoke. That same shot of pieces continuing upwards in an ominous arc, describing the face of the devil. It was all they had to show us, or all they could. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one death captured discretely on a few seconds-worth of home movie footage, the only visual record of one of the most profound moments in American history. Those dates could be forgotten when the event was captured in one still frame, unlike September 11, which is known by the date because events across the country and the world could not be captured in one three-word description, or one camera still. Anchormen could only call it, "the events of September 11, 2001." The Challenger was a sentinel event somewhere between the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. Sort of a forgotten defining moment of history, though complete with both image and soundbite in a neat package. It was not a loss of collective innocence nor was it an existential threat to our way of life.

For a second-grader however, the Challenger was all of these things. It captured tragedy so tidily, like losing an ice cream cone to the pavement, or falling off the swings during recess. Christie McAuliffe was a teacher from Minnesota whose mission on the shuttle was to host a series of educational programs on space flight to be aired for the nation's youth. She was the finalist in a long selection process to find the perfect teacher and role model. McAuliffe captured the pose of Woman-of-the-80s independence while retaining the countenance of the nurturing mother. McAuliffe was part Sally Ride, part Amelia Earhardt, with just enough June Cleaver to pacify the traditionalists. This was a major PR move for NASA. The accomplishments of the prior decades were fading from memory; the program had evolved away from the days of manly, grizzled test pilots in leather jackets strapped to modified ballistic missiles. Sometime in the late 70s, NASA became nerds in blue jumpsuits competing in an uninspiring zero-g science fair. The Space Shuttle was a technological wonder, but nowhere near as captivating as a Saturn V hurtling its payload all the way to the Moon and back. The shuttle never went more than about 300 miles away from the Earth, but somehow felt cold and distant, lacking the humanity of exploration. Christie McAuliffe was supposed to be a reasonable compromise between these poles. As a teacher, she was a human face, suitable to inspire youth while retaining the space program's integrity as a scientific endeavor. She'd be on primetime. It was meant to put the space program back in the public eye. It was a noble cause-- recapturing children's imaginations and pushing our culture back into the game of exploration.

I was 8 years old when the Challenger mission was set to launch, and had just started my day in Ms. Dresner's second grade class. Maybe a year before, I'd had a dream that had set me on a determined quest to become an astronaut, no matter what. It wasn't like some kids dreaming of being a fire fighter or a police man. This was something burning and long lasting. My room was festooned with schematics of spacecraft, some purchased, some my own shaky works. My imagination had little room for dinosaurs, the Transformers or anything else that defined our cohort as the Second Grade Class of 1986. The Challenger mission was probably the coolest thing I could think of, the closest I'd feel to space since that dream, first inspired by Space Mountain at Disneyland, with its inertial lunging in the darkness towards the spiral arms of galaxies, high over the atmospheres of distant planets. Hours of television directed right at me, a kid, like I was at Mission Control. This was something I could grab a hold of on my way from being a young kid, to being the stoic, stubbled spaceman I'd imagined for my future.

We were sitting in rows in a class of about 30 kids when another teacher came to tell us that there had been an accident, and that they weren't sure if anyone had survived. No one really knew what to do. Ms. Dresner left a small radio on, sitting on top of a cabinet, listening for updates. We went on with the lesson plan for the day. There was a chance that the cabin had remained intact and that the seven astronauts were alive at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. There was some hope that it wasn't a complete loss. As second graders, few of us really knew what a complete loss was. That night I had another dream, this time of Ronald Reagan standing at a podium, announcing that no one would go into space for the next 437 years. That was my version of complete loss, I guess.

A few days later everything began to move on. Ms. Dresner passed out our Weekly Readers, warning us that they were printed before the Challenger. The Reader had a story about the success of the mission, with little profiles of each of the astronauts, and part of McAuliffe's lesson plan. It was an awkward half hour for all of us. No one really knew what to do with the Readers, so we looked at the books they advertised on the back. I drew scuba gear on each of the 7 astronauts on the cover, a sort of joking, morbid coping mechanism for what I felt. The jokes came soon thereafter, proving that the event didn't have the gravitas of the Kennedy assassination or 9/11.

Q: "How did they know Christie McAuliffe had dandruff?"
A: "They found her head and shoulders on the beach."

Q: "What does NASA stand for?"
A: "Need Another Seven Astronauts."

And there was another one about 7-up that I don't remember. I knew them all, and told them with gusto, even though I didn't like it.

For my tenth birthday, my mother sent me to Space Camp in Cape Canaveral. My interest in space had continued to grow, and this was a week-long opportunity to steep my brain in All Things Space. We flew shuttle simulators, sat in a chair that simulated lunar gravity, and had tours of everything at Kennedy Space Center. At the end of the week, it happened that there was a shuttle launch scheduled, it was maybe the second launch since the Challenger. We stood on a patch of grass about 5 miles away across water, surrounded by cars and RVs that had come from all over to see the launch. I stood, watched, heard, and felt the shuttle Discovery lift off the pad for space. It is one of the most magnificent and truly awe-inspiring moments of my life. I'll never forget the anticipation, the feeling of witnessing the force it takes to propel an object up and away from the Earth's pull. It will probably remain the only time in my life where I jumped up and down, screaming at the top of my lungs for the site of something so powerful. It was the only moment of true abandon in my life that I can remember.

As I've gotten older and made the compromises that everyone seems to make, I've accepted that I may never make it to space. If I do, it'll be as a tourist and not as an astronaut. My brother was the same way about baseball, and it was sad to see him shirk off his passion for the distractions of adolescence. I don't think most people make it through that rite of passage with their dreams intact, but that's okay. The world needs lawyers, grabagemen and middle managers. We find passion again, in other places. That's the good thing about children from what I'm told.

Even if the Challenger made it to orbit, its impact on the world would probably have been fleeting and negligible. It probably would have gone down in the annals of 80s primetime television with Michael Jackson, ALF, Who's the Boss and the Muncheechees, but we'll never know. Maybe the biggest victim of all was NASA. Space exploration was never the same after the Challenger. Its remaining chromed luster and mystique had been burned away by a bad O-ring somewhere in the stratosphere above Florida. NASA never again tried such a PR stunt, never tried to shed their encroaching super-geek image. It was like witnessing a person whose personal growth had been stunted by tragedy, never moving on, acting like a middle-aged teenager. During the 90s, while everyone else grew up, NASA became one of the last enclaves of true geekdom. It was the decade of the internet, geek-chique, the real revenge of the nerds. Only space exploration seemed to retain that aura from the pre-information age of Dungeons and Dragons, BBSs, and Jolt-drinking hackers in trenchcoats with rainbow wire hanging out of their pockets. Everyone else seemed to move on. Maybe it was superstition that held them back. Maybe they felt like they stepped out of the karmic order of things, like trying to relate to the public was too crass an objective for pure-blooded scientists. Maybe they thought it best to lay low and not ask for much attention after the Challenger. They'd already been burned once by sticking their necks out. The geeks have gotten old and cannot be taught new tricks. The disintegration of the Columbia shuttle in early 2002 was explained as little more than a statistical artifact, like a lightning strike or a plane crash. No one even knew what Columbia's mission had been during the time it spent in orbit before its fateful descent. From then, NASA was relegated to the list of obscure government agencies that ensure incompetents, or those simply lacking in social skills, a living and an excellent pension. An odd bunch of nearsighted explorers with unkempt hair and bad breath.

This one is for the crew of the Challenger, who never completed their mission. The seven people who are remembered today as dusty victims of an increasingly obscure tragedy, a "where were you when" moment, a series of tasteless and weathered jokes. This is for the deferred dreams of second-graders everywhere.

We all desperately need you to keep making more for the rest of us.

We need another seven astronauts.