Forty years ago, a space shuttle exploded. A teacher and her crewmates lost their lives. A generation of schoolchildren watched it happen live. I was one of them.
I was 10 when the Challenger ascended to the stratosphere before splintering into trails of white smoke. In real time, viewers like me learned that those white wisps meant that the shuttle had exploded. Although not immediately confirmed, we understood that the crew, including middle school teacher Christa McAuliffe, had died. Everyone knows that you can’t parachute from a spaceship.
The 40th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy prompts us to pause and remember the sacrifices of the crew. It is also a chance to reflect on how the experience of seeing a tragedy unfold shaped the outlook of a generation.
McAuliffe risked her life so that children could learn about space. Admittedly, space travel didn’t seem that risky in the early 1980s. Shuttle launches rarely merited prolonged attention in the national news.
It was this inattention to the United States’ space ambitions that inspired stunt casting. A civilian was recruited to become an astronaut. To McAuliffe’s credit (unlike some contemporary space tourists), she declined the label. Respectful of the rigorous education and decades-long training of NASA pilots, engineers and scientists, McAuliffe described herself simply as a passenger. Officially, she was a payload specialist. Her humility taught a lesson.
For kids in the 1980s, who watched “The Jetsons” in the morning, played with Transformers toys in the afternoon and saw “Back to the Future” in the cinema, it was obvious that flying cars and perhaps even a moon colony were on the horizon. If they had not happened by 2001, then they certainly could exist a quarter-century later when we would be unimaginably old, in our 50s. A teacher going to space fit the timeline. And then the Challenger exploded.
The 1980s were an odd decade in which to develop a generational worldview. Bill Cosby’s television sitcom seemed to model family values and introduced a type of masculinity that supported the possibilities of girls and women. Cliff Huxtable was a girl dad with four confident daughters and also the husband to a successful lawyer. First lady Nancy Reagan identified marijuana as a gateway drug with the potential to shatter the dreams of children and urged us to “just say no.” The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union suggested that imperial conquest was a thing of the past. Although the television news always carried stories about incidents here or there, none rose to the dystopic level of science fiction movies (such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The Running Man”) in which the American government sanctioned the killing of citizens on the streets.
The Challenger explosion was an awakening. It shook confidence in received narratives of safety. Over subsequent decades, we became inured to the possibility that the things and people in which we believed could prove untrue. From Cosby’s court trials, to cannabis legalization, to the invasion of Ukraine as part of a Russian reunification strategy, to the many death-by-law-enforcement scenarios in American cities, our current moment looks and feels different than what a preteen might have imagined in the ’80s.
And yet, there was something in that explosion that prepared us for the present. We witnessed death without seeing it. We saw McAuliffe, Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair and Gregory Jarvis disappear. They vanished. The loss of life felt true even before official confirmation days later.
News coverage unable to explain the cause of the tragedy prompted folks to trust their gut intuition. These responses proved prescient. Members of this generation alongside their elders would find meaning in Stephen Colbert’s neologism “truthiness” and, later, Donald Trump’s “fake news.” The coverage was neither false nor fake. The explosion happened. However, the information relay was slow; too slow for an audience desiring faster communication and quicker updates.
The explosion signaled that flying cars in every driveway and a moon colony would not happen in our lifetimes. As we encountered warnings about the depleting ozone layer, global warming and the threats of rising sea levels, the Challenger generation was compelled to consider the environment. A spaceship waiting to take us up and far away no longer seemed viable.
Finally, the disaster enabled us all to appreciate the honest, impactful hard work of teaching. As a society, we tend to overlook the impact of teachers except in moments of tragedy. We were reminded of this lesson — one that was promptly forgotten — during the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in 1986, McAuliffe had hoped that her participation would raise the prestige of the teaching profession. Post-mission, her aspiration was to travel the country and talk with schoolchildren about the wonder of space. Risk-taking explorers are not only in history books. They live in our present, walk among us and sometimes are the people standing at the chalkboard in your classroom.
As the Challenger blasted off and the shuttle launched skyward, McAuliffe had already achieved her goal. The anniversary of the Challenger explosion is a reminder of the crew’s daring and enduring impact on a generation.
Harvey Young is a historian and cultural critic. He is a dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
