Long Island educators — grade schoolers in '86 — recall lessons learned in class watching Challenger disaster

The bright orange blast and trails of smoke in the Florida sky on Jan. 28, 1986 supplanted pride and excitement with stunned silence among the children and teens on Long Island and across the nation who watched NASA's live feed of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

School-aged children and teens like Mark McCaw had special reason to celebrate the launch of the Challenger's 10th mission — 40 years ago Wednesday. As the novelty of space flight waned by the mid '80s, NASA sparked renewed public interest with its Teacher in Space Project, through which Concord, Massachusetts high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, 37, was selected for the Challenger mission.

Along with the other ninth graders of Uniondale, McCaw, now principal of the district's Lawrence Road Middle School, scooted his desk close to a TV wheeled before him. Joining McAuliffe aboard the Challenger was Ronald McNair, a man born more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act, who became a laser physicist at MIT and the second Black astronaut in space.

'A tremendous moment'

"Kids loved it ... the teachers were excited because now there’s a teacher on board, and as young men of color, we were excited because there’s a man of color on board," McCaw, 54, of Uniondale, said. "We had no idea what would transpire, but it was definitely a tremendous moment."

Triumph then turned to tragedy. Just 73 seconds into the shuttle's mission, 46,000 feet above the Atlantic, "the Challenger was totally enveloped in the explosive burn," according to the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. McAuliffe, McNair and the five other astronauts on the flight were killed.

"It was shocking; [the room] was silent when it happened," McCaw said. "I believe the teacher turned the TV off ... We had a small discussion about what had happened, that it was a tragedy. There was a lot of quiet."

Four decades after President Ronald Reagan's consoling words to "schoolchildren of America" about the disaster, McCaw and other Long Islanders — many who were children then, teachers now — spoke with Newsday about the whirlwind of emotions surround that core memory.

"I remember people applauding when it took off," said James Richardson, who watched the disaster as a fourth grader in Riverhead and now teaches his hometown district's students of the same age at Roanoke Avenue Elementary School.

Looking to adults

"And then I remember the explosion," Richardson continued. "As a kid, you can’t process what’s happening, you’re too young. So you do what most kids do, you look to the adult for guidance ... You could see the reaction on some of the adults' faces, the shock, and then going to turn the TV off."

Growing up in the 1980s, the only Black scientists or space travelers the then-10-year-old Richardson was aware of were Lt. Uhura from "Star Trek" and other television characters. The significance of having two men of color and a woman going to space — compared to the white male astronauts who flew the Apollo missions to the moon — "was on my mind," he said.

"I didn’t see many things that resembled me out there," Richardson, 49, said. "Today’s a little bit different. So in that moment, knowing someone’s going up in space who looks like me, I could ‘be that person,’ was something I thought about ... It hit."

While the makeup of the crew appeared extraordinary, NASA missions themselves felt quite ordinary by the mid '80s. With the Space Shuttle program's record of success, it seemed safe to welcome aboard McAuliffe, selected from the more than 11,000 teachers who vied for her seat.
"The shuttle was being billed as a routine then," Joshua Stoff, the curator of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, told Newsday. "They were talking about sending kids into space."

Long Island ties

While children looked up to the astronauts aboard the Challenger, many Long Islanders felt proud of the machine itself, having built several of its essential components, according to Stoff. Long Island’s deep aviation history — from airfields developed after the turn of the century, to the manufacturing of World War II bombers and even the creation of the lunar module that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon — thrived inside Fairchild Republic and Grumman manufacturing facilities in Farmingdale and Bethpage, according to Stoff.

Before the Space Shuttle Challenger could first achieve liftoff in 1983, Long Island engineers and laborers had to build its wings, vertical fin and rudder, control surfaces and landing gear doors.

"It is certainly part of our story — the story of spaceflight and man’s trajectory to the stars," Stoff said. "It was really an amazing machine, one of the most complex machines built by man, and it’s amazing you could build something like that that generally performed well."

But NASA had never launched a space shuttle with the temperature as cold as it was at liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986 — 36 degrees, about 15 degrees colder than any previous launch, according to the official commission report. Investigators determined the bitter cold weakened the O-ring seals in the ship's right solid rocket booster, causing the shuttle to rupture. The disaster grounded the Space Shuttle program for more than 2½ years.

"It was almost like the Titanic, ‘the ship is unsinkable, full speed ahead’ kind of thing," Stoff said. "[NASA was] just complacent and didn’t pay attention to a lot of engineers who said it was not safe to launch that day."

A diverse Challenger crew

In additional to McAuliffe and McNair, those killed on the Challenger included payload specialist Gregory B. Jarvis, Air Force Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka — the first Asian American astronaut in space — commander Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith and NASA's second female astronaut, mission specialist Judith Resnik.

"The diversity of the crew at that time period is something that’s so inspirational," said Amanda Sanders, a fourth-grade teacher in Riverhead." "If I show my students a picture of that crew, they’ll notice there are women, there’s an Asian American, there’s an African American. It’s such a great representation of America."

On Wednesday, Sanders plans to discuss the Challenger disaster with her students, especially her fond personal memories of her father, Robert Jester, a Riverhead High School biology teacher at the time, campaigning to be the first "Teacher In Space." Jester told Newsday a seat on the Space Shuttle meant "expanding your classroom to a national or a worldwide level."

Despite the "Bob Jester for space" bumper stickers, he proctored a chemistry midterm on launch day.

After the explosion, Jester, now retired, sequestered himself in a room on campus to gather his thoughts in anticipation of reporters who would likely want them. When a news reporter arrived at the high school and opened with the question, "Do you feel lucky that you didn’t go?" Jester said he became "furious," refused to answer and went home early.

"Most people would say ‘well thank goodness you didn’t go,’ Jester said. "But I thought about [McAuliffe]. She left behind a family, a husband and a mother and a father."

Jester and his daughter said they still hope students are inspired by the sense of exploration embodied by McAuliffe and the rest of the Challenger crew.

"You have to be brave," he added. "There is a cost a lot of times; that hasn’t changed in the last 40 years." 

While he doubts he will ever make it to space, if given the chance, Jester, 78, said he would love "to escape gravity ... in a heartbeat."

How Newsday covered the Challenger disaster