The Challenger Explosion From the Eyes of a 5 Year Old Boy

I can still remember it like it was yesterday, I was a little boy, just five years of age, going out to the playground to see the Space Shuttle Challenger rocket into outer space.

Growing up in a small town called Titusville wasn’t what you’d call glamorous or exciting. In fact the Titusville of 30 years ago is still the same 30 years later. Going to Imperial Estates Elementary as a Kindergartner, I had the unique privilege of being right across the Indian River from the NASA launch pad. Basically we were just 10 miles away, the way the crow flies. 

Even at five years old, I had already seen my share of shuttle launches and they had become somewhat routine. Thrilling, no doubt, but we kids knew what to expect. And if you were to poll the students in my class, we were so inspired by the space program, that all of us fantasized at some point of becoming an astronaut ourselves. 

I don’t remember a lot of things from when I was five years old, but I distinctly remember just how bitterly cold it was that day, but how blue the skies were – not a cloud in sight, in fact. There was no need to wonder if the Challenger had launched or not, because the rumbling and shaking of the ground was the Space Coast’s version of an earthquake.

The rocket boosters were loud, so loud, and seeing the Challenger life itself off the pad with the fire blazing across the sky and smoke leaving a memorable curved path as usual, something fundamentally changed in that launch that through the eyes of a five year old kid, was unable to comprehend. 

The moans and even a few screams from those outside on the playground made it very apparent that this was not normal. Yet to the naked eye of a child, it seemed spectacular, whatever it was that was actually happening. You had a huge explosion in the air, and you had these two rockets that were weaving in and out of each other. The innocence of a child won’t always consider the worst case scenario that was unfolding. Instead, many of us were marveling at the spectacle that our eyes beheld in the sky. 

With reality setting in for the teachers, and some of the older kids already knowing what had just happened, we were scurried back into the classroom. The assignments for the day, no longer mattered. My teacher, Mrs. Pain, sat down on the floor with the rest of us kids, weeping and gripped with sadness. All of us had a connection to the Space Program; at our churches the pews were filled with employees, in fact, my family was friends with the launch director and saw him at church each Sunday. Others had a mother or father whose livelihood came from NASA and spent decades there making the Space Program what it was. Some even had relationships with the astronauts that were on board that fateful mission.

But for all the five and six year old kids in the class room that day, it was our first experience with death and it wasn’t something that could be easily processed or understood. We saw the remorse that came over our teacher, and what seemed like something fun and exciting to be on the Space Shuttle Challenger, now was met with tragic and permanent loss. 

It would take two years and eight months for NASA to recover and press on after such a horrific failure and launch their next manned flight and another fifteen years before it happened all again with Space Shuttle Columbia. 

But for a five year old boy on that cold day in January, it was a moment that was seared in his heart and never ever forgotten.