This one stunned me. I had been at work at the bookstore all morning. We were understaffed and I had been alone since 9 AM that morning with only a few customers straggling in. Our mall was largely unoccupied, with only about 15 stores in the entire place, even though it had been built for 99. I was shelving some books when my 1 PM staffer, Melissa, came walking in like a zombie.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"The space shuttle exploded," she said in a thick Southern accent I can still hear in my head.
My immediate response was, "The one with the teacher??"
The space shuttle missions had quickly become largely routine but this one, with civilian social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe, chosen from thousands of applicants, had been generating a lot of interest and good publicity for NASA. There had been multiple postponements, though, and I hadn't even remembered they were going to try again that day.
The only TV set in our near-dead mall was in the sleazy video store up on the top level so when Melissa came out of the back room, I ran up the escalator. The two guys there hadn't heard about Challenger either as they had been running a movie from a tape. They turned on the news when I explained what had happened and we all stood there dumbfounded as the story unfolded. We watched for an hour just...trying to take it all in.
It was inevitable that at some point there would be another major accident in the space program but this particular shuttle, with the civilian teacher, represented so much hope. So much optimism died along with these seven astronauts. May they Rest in Peace.
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