Remembering Challenger

Jan 28th Marked 35 Years Since the NASA Challenger Disaster

Thoughts from a child of the ‘60s when “Space Shots” were a Part of Our Lives

By TERRY LYONS

Are you in a FUNK over the pandemic? Well, how about digging even deeper, finding cause for further despair? Actually, this column calls for a very different kind of deep dive into your memories and your emotions. It calls for venturing into the human spirit and examining character while seeking INSPIRATION.

If you grew up on Long Island in the 1960s, you were somehow a child of the space program. Our Dad's returned from the war and were employed by Long Island defense industry firms, such as Sperry, Lockheed-Martin, Fairchild - and the big one - Grumman.

Everyone knew someone that knew someone that worked for Grumman, a driver and a nine-iron from our homes in the Island Trees-Bethpage-Plainview-Hicksville area.

My Dad worked for Pan American World Airways and was based at Idlewild Airport - re-named in honor of John F. Kennedy and known worldwide as JFK. As the '60s plowed on, so did the Apollo space program, coming after Mercury and Gemini programs which set the table.

To most, interest in NASA waned after Apollo 11 (and the human interest in troubled Apollo 13), but the Space Shuttle program ventured on, further exploring space, building the International Space Station and launching more satellites "than Carter has pills." (Google it, kiddies).

We were all children of the space program. We loved it. We followed every minute of every "space shot." Now, we must think back to 1986.

It was a terrible day. It remains a terrible memory but one well worth a memorial tribute, even if a few days too late. Thirty-five years ago, as of January 28th (and I missed it, obviously), was the unthinkable Challenger Disaster.

They should be remembered and we have memorized their names:

Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis and school teacher Christa McAuliffe of New Hampshire, on the flight to represent NASA in its finest moments and engage a new generation of scientists in classrooms all over the world..

It quickly became the darkest hour. We all know what happened.

There is an interesting backstory and it underlines the word "Presidential."

Peggy Noonan - a young but former CBS News Producer turned White House staff member - was brought in from the bullpen and penned the speech - certainly one of the most fitting and presidential speeches of our lifetime, delivered so well by President Ronald Reagan to a shocked nation/world. They had five hours to prepare.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans,” he said. “Today is a day for mourning and remembering.

“We’ve grown used to wonders in this century,” he said. “It’s hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years, the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.”

“I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who watched the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff,” Reagan said. “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”

He continued: “We don’t hide our space program,” said President Reagan. “We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute.

"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God," wrote Noonan for President Reagan in a national address to the country on the very evening he was scheduled to do The State of the Union address.

Noonan remembered the poem from her seventh grade English classes. It reads in full:

High Flight

by

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Amazing.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. wrote the poem months before his own death as a WWII fighter pilot. Magee died at the age of 19. His inspirations for his poem were many;

The last words of High Flight — "...and touched the face of God" — can also be found in a poem by Cuthbert Hicks, published three years earlier in Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight. The last two lines in Hicks' poem, The Blind Man Flies, are:

For I have danced the streets of heaven,

And touched the face of God.

The anthology includes the poem New World, by G. W. M. Dunn, which contains the phrase "on laughter-silvered wings". Dunn wrote of "the lifting mind", another phrase that Magee used in High Flight, and refers to "the shouting of the air", in comparison to Magee's line, "chased the shouting wind". Another line by Magee, "The high untrespassed sanctity of space", closely resembles "Across the unpierced sanctity of space", which appears in the anthology in the poem Dominion over Air.

“I kind of figured the entire nation had seen an auto accident, you know?” Noonan later said to The Washington Post. “The president is going to have to do a speech that is aimed at those who are 8-years-old, and those who are 18, and those who are 80 without patronizing anybody.”

They didn’t. And we moved on, together as a nation.

Remember that?