FARGO – On a clear and chilly morning 30 years ago, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida and, 74 seconds after launch, exploded as millions of Americans watched on TV, many of them young children for whom the disaster has come to define their generation.
Three decades later, the confusion and horror from the event are still felt, but it didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of those who keep their eyes on the skies.
Cherish Bauer-Reich, Fargo, was 10 when the Challenger explosion happened. She lived in Bismarck at the time and, like many kids her age, had dreams of being an astronaut someday.
“I was completely fascinated with space,” Bauer-Reich said. She didn’t watch the launch at school and her mother, knowing that the news would devastate her daughter, broke it to her gently in the car ride home.
“It didn’t really sink in until I got home and saw the explosion on TV,” she said, “I thought, ‘How could they let this happen?’ ”
ADVERTISEMENT
Her son, Jacob, is 11, about the same age that she was when Challenger exploded. Like his mom, he’s fascinated by space and is “a budding engineer,” she said. While she became more realistic about space travel after Challenger, she says, she still shares his fascination.
Juan Cabanela, Minnesota State University Moorhead professor of physics and astronomy, was a 16-year-old at Lourdes High School in Rochester, Minn., when the Challenger disaster happened.
His history class didn’t watch the launch and when a friend told him between classes that the space shuttle blew up, he thought it was a joke.
“I immediately found a TV, and they kept running that video over and over and over,” Cabanela said. He compared the saturation of those images to repeated footage of the 9/11 terror attacks.
He had given up his aspirations of being an astronaut, but he was well on his way to a career in the field of astronomy.
“I was a pudgy kid and astronauts had to be fairly ripped, and I was trying to be realistic about my goals,” he said. “By that point, I was more into the science.”
Cabanela wasn’t personally fazed by the explosion, but NASA and space exploration in general were devastated. He points to the grave lessons NASA learned owning up to the organizational mistakes that led to the disaster and the fact that the timeline for the Hubble Space Telescope was disrupted by grounding the shuttle fleet.
Despite those roadblocks, he still sees the thrill of scientific exploration in his classrooms every day. One of his students recently did a NASA internship and was able to study robotics.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The people I see are interested in NASA, and they are no matter what,” he said.
This article has been edited to correct the spelling of Cabanela.
