Remembering the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Today is the 39th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger’s explosion upon takeoff, on January 28, 1986. We lost seven astronauts that day — the first time we had ever lost any in-flight, and the first in my lifetime. I have never forgotten the moment, even though I was only six years old; it was the first true national trauma I lived through. (It would not be the last.) I suppose I could have waited until the 40th anniversary next year to write this reminiscence, as my editor suggested this morning, but, then again, you never know when you might errantly stumble down a manhole or in front of an El train, so I might as well get this down on paper quickly while these fingers still function.

There is more than mere insouciance to my words. I’ll never forget where I was that day or how it affected me; the Challenger catastrophe was no minor incident in my young life. As a child of late 1980, I’m too young to have any solid recollection of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection, or anything whatsoever of political or international importance until this exact moment. My first real memory of things outside my family routine, of the “real world,” came with this. And how could it not have? For this was the moment when I was first forced to confront the reality of death.

That seems like a silly thing to say, but it is indubitably true for me. I was fortunate to have a rather peaceful, bucolic childhood; I hadn’t yet lost anyone or anything close to me. The concept of death had only a notional meaning to me at that point, something barely considered let alone understood. Until that horrible day.

I was in first grade. I remember that we were all excited for the Challenger’s launch, because it meant we got to get out of class for the morning to watch it on television in the big room. Furthermore, our teachers had been buzzing about it for weeks — a schoolteacher was going into space! — and it was going to be a fun festive day. I remember the shuttle taking off from the launch pad, streaming up into the sky, and then . . . it was gone, gone in a flaming cloud of smoke. There were shouts in the room — not stunned silence but vocal disbelief. I remember not being able to understand what had happened — was everybody okay? — until the horrified teachers came to the front of the room and told us that the shuttle had exploded. I remember seeing some of the adults crying softly, which, as a six-year-old kid, is actually what utterly terrified me — I never wanted to feel that the adults in the room were vulnerable or emotionally distraught; that was my role, as a kid, not theirs.

My mother came to pick me up early from school that day. My father got home from work much earlier than usual. I remember asking him naively, “Why didn’t the astronauts just use their parachutes to jump out of the shuttle?” and him gently trying to explain to me how that wasn’t possible. All that time I simply could not process the reality of it: How could they be dead? Just like that? Were they scared? What about that poor teacher? I had never seen anybody die. I had never even contemplated the idea of loss. I was confused and upset.

Which is why I remember the speech Reagan delivered that afternoon, before dinnertime, so well. Reagan’s address, written in an emotionally exhausted but poetically inspired whirlwind by legendary speechwriter Peggy Noonan, is only four minutes long, and I welcome you to watch it once again. I cannot do so without getting a little emotional, suddenly remembering myself as that sad, scared, vulnerable six-year-old, faced with the reality of my heroes dying unexpectedly right in front of my eyes. And I’ll never forget the moment when the president of the United States stopped to talk directly to me, that scared kid:

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. 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.

It was precisely what I needed to hear, and I do mean precisely. I didn’t suddenly have some amazing epiphany about death and the meaning of life — after all, I was only six. But after listening to the president explain what had happened in those even tones of his, I no longer felt quite so queasy and bewildered. And I remember feeling encouraged when he continued: “There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.”

As an Xennial, Reagan is but the faintest of childhood memories for me — my political awareness didn’t dawn until the late Bush years. I lived through and enjoyed the fruits of his policy victories, of course, but my sole true memory from the Reagan years is that of his reaction to the Challenger disaster. And the reason is that I never forgot how a stranger on television could reach me in my first moment of great moral confusion, and calmly assure me that, despite tragedy, everything would be all right for America — and leave me asking my mother to explain, through her sniffling, what it meant to “reach out and touch the face of God.”