24 years ago...

[johno]

I was walking down a hallway at NORAD, when the boards lit up. Without the *exercise* light on.

I raced to the nearest office, to find everyone clustered around the TV watching as CNN ran the explosion over and over and over...

Comments

[callibr8]

I was walking across the parking lot at 8:35am Pacific Time when I felt a shiver and didn't know why. Moments later, as I reached my desk at the high-tech company where I worked as a firmware engineer, one of my co-workers - the one with the degree in physics - told me that Challenger had just blown up. Several of us engineers, all in varying degrees of shock, managed to scrounge up one of two TVs in the whole facility to watch the replay coverage. At that time the previously mentioned co-worker posited a problem with the seals on the booster rockets, given the unusually cold temperatures at the launch site that day. Yes, the very same seals that Richard Feynman demonstrated the failure mode of, using a glass of ice water, in the congressional hearings, months later.