Kurt Leucht’s Blog

Where were you when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded?

24 years ago yesterday, I was almost 16 years old and a Sophomore in high school in a small town in Central Illinois.  But when I heard about the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion  I was actually inside the grade school up the street where some of my friends and I occasionally went to eat lunch.  We were walking down the hallway when someone came up to us and said “Did you hear that the Shuttle blew up?”.  This was a kid who had gone home for lunch and had just come back to school for the afternoon.  I didn’t believe it at first … thought he was trying to pull a prank or tell a bad joke or something.

We didn’t have any TVs in school way back then and the Internet and cell phones didn’t even exist, so it was all by word of mouth.  If kids didn’t go home during lunch period to eat, most of the rest of us might not have even heard the news till we all got home from school that afternoon.  I remember watching it over and over and over on the TV after school.  They played the explosion about a million times.  The newscasters were all studying the video to see if they could see the Shuttle orbiter or at least the crew cabin falling from the cloud. I wasn’t sad at the time I was watching it because I had this hope that the crew had somehow survived or gotten blown clear of that horrible looking explosion.

A couple years later, when I was a senior, I painted a 2 story tall mural inside my high school dedicated to the Challenger crew:  http://www.leucht.com/blog/2007/02/space-shuttle-challenger-mural-at-my-high-school/

A couple years later when I was in college, I got a co-op job with NASA. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Kurt Leucht

P.S. Feel free to leave your own answer to the question “Where were you…” below in the comments or directly in the Facebook comments if that’s where you found this article.

I worked at the NASA press site today in support of STS-125, the final Hubble servicing mission. The press site was really busy for this mission. Usually I escort media personnel to various locations for various reasons. To my surprise, today I was asked to escort some of the press photographers to the roof of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to photograph the launch. Wow! What an opportunity! It was a great launch and it went right on time. Here are some photos that I took from the top of the VAB. Click on each thumbnail for a larger version.

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We got a car pass and watched Endeavour launch last night on STS-126 from the NASA Causeway viewing site. It was awesome!

Elijah waits patiently for the launch.  We got there almost 2 hours beforehand.  Notice the nearly full moon out the window.  A beautiful and clear night for a launch.

And we have liftoff!  The picture doesn’t do it justice, because it lights up the night sky as if it were daylight!

We could see it almost all the way down to the horizon.  Very cool.

Kurt

After a spectacular mission, Discovery and the STS-120 crew came in for a safe landing at KSC a few days ago. I work out at KSC, and I went outside my building to watch Discovery glide in. When the Space Shuttle lands from South to North, it glides pretty much right over the KSC Industrial Area, where about half of the KSC employees work. I happened to have my digital pocket camera on me, so I shot this footage. It’s not the greatest quality video, but it’s about all I can expect out of my pocket digital camera.

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Click here to watch the video on YouTube. You can hear the sonic booms in the footage and you can also hear it “whooshing” through the air as it passes close overhead. Remember the Space Shuttle Orbiter lands in an unpowered glide, so the “whooshing” is purely the sound of a large lifting body cutting through the air as it glides down to an unpowered landing.

I was at the NASA Press Site yesterday for the launch of STS-120. What an amazing launch that was to witness. I’ve seen a lot of launches, and this one was the loudest I can remember. I imagine the extreme loudness can be attributed to either the heavy humid air, or the wind direction, or the low cloud deck, or probably a combination of these atmospheric conditions. I took these photos of the launch while at the same time helping to make sure people didn’t “loiter” in front of the big countdown clock. When people stand directly in front of the clock, it has a tendency to annoy most of the TV stations who are using the footage from the countdown clock in their live launch feeds. Click on a photo for a larger version in my photo gallery.

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BLOG CONTEST: I will give one dollar via PayPal to the first person who can identify the white haired man in the white shirt in the second photo. Anyone that I know and have already told is obviously not eligible! Also, anyone who was actually at the NASA Press Site yesterday is not eligible. To enter, you must email me (Kurt only) via the web based email form on my website and tell me your name and your email address so that I can PayPal you the money. If you enter using this method, your email address will only be seen by me and nobody else. If you don’t mind sharing your email address with the whole world, you can enter by adding a comment to this blog posting. I promise I will not use your email address for anything other than sending you the one dollar.