Challenger
22 years ago today....
January 28, 1986
My family had moved to Orlando not much longer than a year ago, and our new house was approx 50 miles due west of the launch pads at Kennedy Space Center. It was a real treat to walk outside the front door and watch the Shuttle launches. The fateful day of Jan 28, 1986, I happened to be home sick from school with the flu. Dad had CNN or the local news on for the countdown at which point I grabbed my little blue Kodak camera and walked outside to grab a few pictures. (Note: I'm still trying to locate the pictures that I took and will update this blog entry when I find them)
Just a third grader at the time, it had a profound affect on me. I can't really say I truly understood the impact of what happened, but I was quite shaken for a few days as I recall.
A few months later, my close friends from Ft. Lauderdale were visiting and we decided to re-enact the launch. We decided my bedroom was a suitable Space Shuttle Challenger cockpit if we laid on our backs with our feet going up the wall, after all, this closely mimic real world situations to the best of our knowledge. We were however astronauts, and this required a well equipped cockpit. Scavenging the house for any worthy devices, we setup the cockpit which consisted of:
January 28, 1986
My family had moved to Orlando not much longer than a year ago, and our new house was approx 50 miles due west of the launch pads at Kennedy Space Center. It was a real treat to walk outside the front door and watch the Shuttle launches. The fateful day of Jan 28, 1986, I happened to be home sick from school with the flu. Dad had CNN or the local news on for the countdown at which point I grabbed my little blue Kodak camera and walked outside to grab a few pictures. (Note: I'm still trying to locate the pictures that I took and will update this blog entry when I find them)
Just a third grader at the time, it had a profound affect on me. I can't really say I truly understood the impact of what happened, but I was quite shaken for a few days as I recall.
A few months later, my close friends from Ft. Lauderdale were visiting and we decided to re-enact the launch. We decided my bedroom was a suitable Space Shuttle Challenger cockpit if we laid on our backs with our feet going up the wall, after all, this closely mimic real world situations to the best of our knowledge. We were however astronauts, and this required a well equipped cockpit. Scavenging the house for any worthy devices, we setup the cockpit which consisted of:
- Four walkie-talkies for communication with Houston
- One electric calculator to display random numbers relating yo our speed and altitude
- One globe to determine our location
- 2 Etch'n'Sketch's
- 1 Speak'n'Spell - used for the countdown
- 1 Slinky - those things made some cool noises
- 1 mini-Pac-Man arcade game
- 1 Am/FM radio & cassette player
Labels: 1986, challenger, jan 28 1986, nasa, nasa.gov, shuttle, space
posted by BigTallGeoff at
11:38 AM
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