NASA lays wreath for space shuttle challenger disaster

The event will celebrate the missions of the Challenger and honor the lives of the seven astronauts.

NEWS CENTER’s current anchor Pat Callahan was on site in Florida to report on the tragedy as details continued to unfold about the accident.

NASA marked the 30th anniversary Thursday of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger with a pledge to remember lost astronauts as it presses on toward Mars. The project was designed by NASA to increase interest in the shuttle program.

Up until the final day before launch, Morgan noted, Christa McAuliffe took time to write college recommendations for her students.

In a 1986 world, pre September 11th, where everyone wasn’t carrying smart phones and didn’t have the latest breaking news at their fingertips, this was the first disaster that was watched live on television.

“There were people from every state selected as alternates”.

The CEO of the Astronaut Memorial Foundation, Thad Altman, said space exploration fulfills a “divine mission of spreading the light of life through all of God’s creation”. “So the national commitment to human space flight, it really shows the American spirit, the can-do spirit”. He was at Kennedy Space Center for Challenger’s launch, and had gotten to know not only McAuliffe but a few of the other astronauts on the doomed flight.

She called Scobee a “deep and poetic thinker”, and remembered how McAuliffe made time to write recommendations for her students, even as the launch approached.

Said Robert Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center: “The Challenger crew will forever be young – and never forgotten”. Following the explosion, shuttle flights were canceled for two years.

Principal Jeff Silverman spoke briefly before requesting a moment of silence for the Challenger crew: McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith A. Resnik, Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, Mike J. Smith and Ellison S. Onizuka. The board spoke of a “broken safety culture” at NASA, particularly for that mission.

“Chuck recalls so much about his 30 year NASA career”. They knew he had applied for the seat the McAuliffe occupied.

For the seven astronauts’ loved ones, January 28, 1986, remains fresh in their minds.

“I got all of the necessary application forms and it was a terribly involved application and that was in the days when it was a typewriter”, he said during an interview at his home Thursday.