Max: Challenger, 23 Years On

23 years ago today -- almost to this hour -- I was in the basement of Chaminade, in the school's primitive CS lab. The principal announced the explosion over the PA. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it must have been vague enough to leave me with the impression that the shuttle had exploded on the ground before launch. Or maybe that is just what I wanted to believe. If the shuttle was still on the ground, the crew might not yet have been aboard.

Right after CS was lunch. Challenger was, understandably, the sole topic of conversation. Sometime over the course of lunch I realized that the shuttle had exploded after take-off. My first class after lunch was French. But on that day it was "stare at a TV slacked-jawed" class. 23 years later and we are just getting around to mothballing the shuttle and are just starting to try to come up with something better, something that will get us more than a few hundred kilometers off the surface.