The Northwest Airlines Flight was carrying our family from Minneapolis to Orlando at the beginning of our Disney World vacation.
It was Jan. 28, 1986.
Like any good preteen, I was a Mickey Mouse groupie and had waited my entire young life for this vacation.
I shimmied in my seat as the plane’s flight path arced toward Cape Canaveral. The words from the Electric Light Parade songs ran through my head.
A spoiled child, I had already been to Europe, Mexico, and on other worldly voyages. But to an innocent of my age, all the Munch paintings in Scandanavia couldn’t compare to a face-to-face meeting with The Mouse.
I was 12, the perfect age for making memories.
As we boarded the airplane, we learned that our flight coincided with the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. We would get to watch from the windows of the plane.
In the background our pilot calmly narrated each phase of the launch: “Those of you on the left side of the plane will see the Challenger space shuttle carrying Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian in space.”
My class had been following preparations for McAuliffe’s flight for several weeks. Everyone knew the story of the first teacher in space. Teachers were heroes in my hometown, and all the kid’s magazines and TV programs were following the story with fervor.
From what I could tell, all children aboard this near-empty flight had been seated on the left, of course, to prevent stampeding.
The pilot continued, “If you watch closely you will see the first phase of the launch. In four minutes the shuttle will drop its primary boosters. I’ll take a break now. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of myself and the crew, we hope you enjoy the flight.”
The muted sound of drink carts began to clink at the back of the plane, and the attendant chimed in: “Ladies and gentleman, in just a few moments we will begin our beverage service.”
The pilot’s narrative picked up again minutes later. Challenger appeared in the blue Florida sky, leaving a single stream of white spinning upward, a yo-yo on a twisted string.
“Now that we’re at a safe cruising altitude, my co-pilot and I will continue to narrate the process for you. Between the captain and the crew, we have seen seven launches here at Cape Canaveral, so keep your eyes peeled.”
More clinking.
A gray puff appeared, then grew, gently, in the middle of Challenger’s rocket stream.
Slowly, like a winding sheet, two V-shaped fingers of ash began billowing from the lower left side, extending farther and farther into the blue afternoon.
The pilot’s voice paused, distant, farther away from the microphone: “I’ve never seen that before.”
Then silence. Utter silence, as the pilot waited for a report from below.
There was no announcement, no explanation, and when we landed, we assumed it was just like any other flight, anywhere in the world.
It wasn’t until we joined a quiet crowd in front of an airport television that we learned that we just happened to have had a window seat to witness one of the events that changed the world.
For a brief moment, time paused in the middle of that hectic international airport. It was an odd feeling, as though we had had box seats to my generation’s version of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Challenger’s explosion was a defining event for us.
I still went off to see The Mouse, but the trip to Disney World was subdued.
I spent the rest of the week writing in my journal. It was my first true experience witnessing a person’s death, and I remember sitting up until late each night under the hotel room’s reading lamp, scribbling into the wee hours.
The Challenger disaster nearly shut down funding for U.S. space programs in the succeeding five years, and it wasn’t until private industry began to salvage bits and pieces of the program that long-term space flight slid back into the public’s consciousness.
For years, the re-entry into space was tentative, halting, completely unlike the first flights of the 1960s. We were a nation afraid to fail. The space race was off.
Yet today, as commercial efforts speed the pace of space research, there is hope again that we will enter a new era of discovery. From the X-Prize, which offers $10 million to the first engineering crew that produces a reusable spacecraft, to the tourism moguls who are ready to devote billions of dollars to the first space hotel.
But for me, the new space race is still defined in a single moment, one afternoon in the air, when a girl of 12 learned a lesson on mortality and found that every discovery has its intangible price.
It left a strange legacy.
I can’t get on an airplane anymore without asking for a window seat. My frequent flier preferences specify a window seat, and I rarely leave the window when I fly. I really don’t know why. Maybe I just expect that, someday, I’ll discover something out there.
