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Godspeed Discovery
Geek Speak column
[Published in the Key West Citizen Locals Guide on October 29, 2010.]
Godspeed Discovery
It was a sunny and cold Tuesday morning in late January as I looked north out of my South Florida office window, and something was cruelly wrong. It was 1986, barely 16 months since I had moved on from my life in Cape Canaveral and my job working on Space Shuttle launch systems. That morning Space Shuttle Challenger, after six postponements, had finally lifted off the pad. It carried a diverse crew, including a Japanese American military man from Hawaii, an African American Karate black-belt from South Carolina and MIT, a female classical pianist and Engineer from Akron, and a civilian woman who had been selected to be the first “teacher in space”. Tragically, she would not reach it.
Even from so far south, on a clear day you could watch the blaze of a launching Shuttle as it shot spaceward from the Cape. But this one was different – the solid rocket booster contrails took a crazy path. The others in the room, who had not witnessed a dozen launches from close-up as I had, didn’t realize there was a problem. But I knew something was wrong. I ran down the hall to a friend’s office that had a small TV (pre-Internet days). There I got the sickening news: 73 seconds into the flight, Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded. (more…)