Dozens of visitors paid tribute at a ceremony here Saturday to the seven astronauts who died on January 28, 1986, when the shuttle exploded in an enormous fireball of hydrogen and liquid oxygen 73 second after liftoff above Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The visitors at the Kennedy Space Center here recalled where they were and what they were doing on that gloomy day.
"I watched it unfold from my office window 20 years ago," said William
Potter, chairman of the Astronauts Memorial Foundation, which is in charge of keeping alive the memory of the 24 astronauts who have died since 1964.
The disaster that unfolded before crowds gathered at Kennedy Space Center and on national television in 1986 remains engraved on the national psyche.
Americans watched the shuttle blow up shortly after liftoff. Its two
booster rockets left a trail of flame and smoke, forming an immense "V" in the sky, an image repeatedly shown on US television this week.
Then-president Ronald Reagan was visibly shaken by the accident and cancelled his State of the Union address scheduled later the same day.
The tragedy has marked US history, much like the assassination of president John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the September 11, 2001, attacks, another excruciating event that Americans watched unfold on live televion.
Richard Norman, a 57-year-old retiree who came from Michigan for the ceremony, was at work when Challenger exploded.
"I can't remember what I ate yesterday, but I can remember that," Norman said. "It's so traumatic, ... it touches you deeply."
Shirley Mayotte, 79, also from Michigan, said she was on the phone with her son, who lived in Florida, when "He said, 'Oh, no. There's something wrong,' and it was something that was terrible."
"Just like the assassination of the president (Kennedy), we all remember what we were doing then," said US legislator Tom Feeney, who represents
Florida.
The explosion was also seen by the Challenger astronauts' 12 children, said June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger pilot Francis "Dick" Scobee.
During a speech at the remembrance ceremony, Scobee Rodger read a letter written by her daughter Kathy years after the tragedy.
The explosion "was a national tragedy, everyone saw it," the daughter wrote. "My dad died a 100 times a day on TV."
The Challenger disaster killed co-pilot Michael Smith, 40; physicist Ronald
McNair, 38, only the second black astronaut; Gregory Jarvis, 42, a mission specialist; Ellison Onizuka, 40, a Haitian-born astronaut of Japanese descent; and mission specialist Judith Resnik, 37.
It also killed its most famous passenger, high school teacher Christa
McAuliffe, 37, whose role as the first civilian taking part in a shuttle mission had turned her into a celebrity.