1986

Disaster

On Sunday, January 28, 1986 was one of those days that I always will remember. I had gone into Custom Programming Service’s office in Indialantic around 8:30 in the morning to work on the NCR contract and had been working for a while with lunch approaching and I decided to go get some fast food and bring it back to the office to eat.  It was one of those perfect Florida winter days, sunny, 75 degrees, the air was crisp and bright. As I got into my Chevy van the first thing I hear on the radio that the Space Shuttle Challenger was about to lift off. By this time shuttle launches had become routine for me after seeing most of them, a couple directly across from the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center, and I had forgotten about this one.  With the Space Center only 30 or so miles north of Indialantic, rocket launches are easily visible, so I got out of my Chevy van, leaving the radio on so I can hear the countdown and stand out in the parking lot.  At  11:26 I hear on the radio, “FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE, we have ignition, we have liftoff.”  Looking north I don’t see it at first but then I see it, rising in the sky, when just over a minute later I see something unusual, a large round cloud of smoke and then two streams of smoke rising up from the cloud, not the normal single stream of smoke.  After seeing many shuttle launches I immediately knew this was not normal.  Then it hit me, the shuttle blew up, it was only the two solid boosters that were continuing upward.  I run inside and yell at my coworker Jimmy, “THE SPACE SHUTTLE JUST BLEW UP!”  He says “What?” and I repeat “The space shuttle blew up, come look.”, and he follows me outside where we can see the smoke trails still in the sky and then we begin to hear the rumble of the explosion having taken just over two minutes to reach us.  We both stare at it for a few minutes longer then Jimmy went back inside the office while I got into my Chevy van and drove home and turned the news on the TV.  

At 11:39 a.m. EST, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The spacecraft disintegrated 46,000 feet (14 km) above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida.  

This would cause a two year delay in space shuttle missions until they figured out it was caused by faulty O-rings in the solid rocket boosters.

Flemington