It isn't often you can witness history by just stepping out your front door, but I did just that twenty years ago today.
I was "between jobs", and living in a small garage apartment (more garage than apartment, as I remember) just off Edgewater Drive in Orlando.
Back in 1986, everybody in town would rountinely stop what they were doing and look towards the east when a Space Shuttle was launched. The Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is 50 or so miles away, but you could easily see the smoke and flame of a shuttle launch as it cleared the tree line or skyline and headed into the sky. If it was cloudy, you could still see the flame burning through the clouds. Night launches would literally light up the sky. It was always a remarkable sight, but as I said, it had become rather routine by January of '86.
NASA was alternating Discovery with Challenger, throwing Atlantis into the mix in October of 1985. Altogether, there had been 10 Space Shuttle Missions in the previous year, or nearly one a month. Just over two weeks before, Florida Congressman (now US Senator) Bill Nelson had been sent into space on Shuttle Columbia.
January 28, 1986 had dawned downright cold, rather than just chilly, and it didn't warm up as the day wore on. By 11am, it was still just 28 degrees. I remember, since it is pretty unusual in Florida for the day of the month and the air temperature to be the same number.
The launch of Space Shuttle Challenger had been set for January 22... then postponed to the 23rd...then the 24th...then the 25 because of bad weather at an African tracking site...bad weather at KSC pushed the launch to January 27th, but that was pushed back another day because of mechanical problems. The exterior hatch closing device could not be removed from the hatch; it had to be sawed off and then bolted back into place. Finally, on January 28th, the launch was ready, then delayed for two hours due to cross winds at the emergency landing site.
By 11:30 in the morning of the 28th, the countdown was underway.
I turned on CNN, put a heavy coat on me and a leash on my sheltie. Together, we walked out the front door at T-minus 2 minutes and counting. I found a patch of grass, near the dog's favorite tree, and looked up into the bright, blue, cloudless sky.
It was the kind of sky we rarely get in Florida, since you need the proper combination of cold air and low humidity.
Suddenly, I could see the plume of white smoke rise out of the eastern horizon...it was straight, but puffy, and widened at the bottom the further away it got from the yellow-orange flame at the tip. This was the way a shuttle launch always looked, at least the last dozen times I had seen it, but I never got tired of watching.
Within seconds, the white smoke got strangely thick at the top, turning into a round shape with two distinct plumes branching out of the sides. It looked like a tuning fork.
"That can't be right!", I stupidly said to my dog, yanking him away from his tree and into the apartment. The same NASA announcer who had been counting down to liftoff as I walked out, now said "obviously...a major malfunction".
"yeah, No S---, Sherlock!" I yelled back at the TV...the dog just looked confused, wondering why his walk had been cut short.
Later, we would all come to know what a major understatement the major malfunction comment really was.
NASA did an investigation, of course, and determined the explosion of Challenger was caused by an O-ring failure in the right Solid Rocket Booster. They also noted that cold weather was a "contributing factor".
In the interveneing years, I have spoken with people who were working for NASA at the time, and were alot closer to things than I was. I've heard some pretty interesting theories about "what really happened", ranging from sabatoge to pressure from the White House (President Reagan was to give his State of the Union speech that night, and I've been told his handlers had planned on a live "chat" with his teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe).
Yet, even after twenty years, one distinct image stays with me.
No matter where I went around town that day, all I had to do was look up to be reminded of what had happened. That "tuning fork cloud" hung over the City of Orlando all day long, until the sun went down on January 28, 1986
