I can not believe it's been thirty five years.
For those of us who were born in the 1960s and 1970s the first time we had a “generational” moment, a moment where we know exactly where we were when it occurred, occurred 35 years ago today. Much like people older than us know exactly where they were when John Kennedy was shot, we as a generation know exactly where we were when we heard that Challenger blew up 74 seconds after liftoff from an icy Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The event that occurred thirty five years ago today.
In one way, it's been amazing that it happened thirty five years ago, because it sure doesn't seem that long, at least to me. But when you look at footage about the accident (something I really don't like to do, always covering my eyes at the words “Challenger, you are go for throttle-up”), you see grainy, standard-def video, you see spokespeople with big 80s hair, and you see computers that, while advanced for their time, probably have less processing power than the phones you hold in your hand. The evidence is there. It really DID happen 35 years ago today.
Since Challenger, of course, there have been other “generational” moments that have occurred. And I think it's surprising that the loss of another space shuttle, Columbia in 2003, wasn't among them. I don't know if that's because we already had a spaceflight “trauma”, or because by that point people just didn't care, but for most people Columbia didn't mean a thing. Or at least it didn't mean as much as the other two “generational” events that occurred after Challenger.
What were those events? Well, September 11th is one of them. Everybody know where they were when the planes hit the towers. I have a feeling January 6th of this year, when insurrectionists & white supremacists stormed the US Capitol, might soon be defined as another. And the last generational event might surprise you, but it's true. Everybody knows where they were the night O.J. Simpson took a ride in that white Ford Bronco. It's wasn't as earth-shattering of an event as Kennedy or Challenger or 9/11, but everybody seems to know where they were that Friday night. And some might even argue that since O.J hired an attorney named Robert Kardashian and gave he and his family their first access to fame, it's the most influential of the generational events.
And that's a scary thought in itself.
But for many of us, the first “generational” event of our lifetime was Challenger, which occurred thirty five years ago today, whether you want to believe it or not.
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