January 28, 1986 is a day that all of us at Seed remember vividly. We wondered how it impacted others in our global science community, how it might have changed others' perspectives. To that end, we asked some friends for a moment of time to jot down a note of reflection, pen a reactionary screed or give a brief answer to the question, "Where were you when the Challenger exploded?" Here's what we heard back:
"Nearly 50 years into the space age, spaceflight remains the pinnacle of human challenge, an endeavor just barely possible with today's technology. We at NASA are privileged to be in the business of learning how to do it, to extend the frontier of the possible, and, ultimately, to make space travel routine. It is an enormously difficult enterprise. The losses we commemorate today are a strong and poignant reminder of the sternness of the challenge."
—NASA Administrator Michael Griffin in a statement to the press, January 26, 2006
"I was on an airplane flying back to Princeton from [Jet Propulsion Laboratory], where I had seen the first pictures coming back from the Voyager 2 fly-by of Uranus. Marvelous pictures of Miranda, a new world that nobody had seen before, transmitted by a spacecraft that the JPL engineers had upgraded with new software during the long flight from Saturn to Uranus. And then, on the airplane, pictures of Challenger exploding—What a sad contrast! Voyager, a triumph of science and technical competence; the Shuttle, a tragedy of politics and technical incompetence."
—Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
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"I walked into my secretary's office, and she told me the news, adding sadly, "And all the little children watched their teacher die." I remember being angry at Reagan, who had responded to criticisms that he had neglected education by sending a schoolteacher into space—an empty, and, as it turned out, reckless symbolic gesture. More self-centeredly, I thought of the grant proposal I was about to send to NASA with some MIT colleagues to study the effects of zero-gravity on the perception of shape and spatial orientation, and how NASA would now no doubt have other, more pressing concerns. And I thought that the Space Shuttle was emblematic of America in the 1970s (when the program had been conceived and developed) —squat and ugly, without a clear purpose and technologically shoddy."
—Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist and linguist, author of The Language Instinct
"I remember I was teaching a class at Yale when I heard the news. It served as a stark and sad reminder that space travel is expensive and dangerous for humans, and that the best way to do science in space involves unmanned travel."
—Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist, Case Western Reserve University
"I was watching the launch at the University of Pittsburgh where I was a visiting professor in the philosophy department. I was on sabbatical there, so unlike most of the faculty, I had a bit more time to hang around Pitt's Cathedral of Learning basement where there were coffee shops and a TV.
When the Challenger exploded there was complete and utter silence on the part of the dozens of students watching with me, only broken by an occasional, "My God!" and an expletive or two.
My thought was that there was a teacher on that Shuttle. The teacher was someone I did not know but had lived in my hometown for a time: Christina McAuliffe. She knew my dad who owned and ran the most popular drug store in Framingham, Mass., for many years. They had chatted while she waited for him to fill a prescription.