I still can't watch footage of the Challenger. Nor could I, after that day, watch any other shuttle launches or re-entries. The instantaneous explosion of that day left no room for rational process, it hit me at the molecular level. I was turned inside out at the magnitude of the spectacle, even as I hadn't drawn any rational conclusions about what I was actually seeing. I still remember my confusion as I watched the shuttle blow apart, realizing now that my very wondering at what was happening, was itself a sign of death. Had the shuttle launched into space like an arrow, with the rocket body falling away, this would have been "normal". There would have been no attempt to understand because that would have been as it should be. Instead I remember thinking something wasn't right, but somehow my imagination failed me. I know that might seem strange. I mean it was an explosion so how much imagination does it take to understand an explosion? The damn shuttle was in bits. Billions of pieces chaotically rearranging the blue sky. But my brain couldn't put together the crew, (that mere hours, an hour, earlier had been waving on the tarmac) with nothingness. The person I had watched for months get ready for this moment, was no more. In seconds, 7 people had gone from vividly present to silenced. They marked that invisible line between life and death with a spectacular failure of human hubris. And human grit. NASA ground control checked in, reporters tried to come up with something to say, and the looks on the faces of the family members watching the launch, live at Kennedy Center, all are lodged, in no particular order, in my memory. But the sick feeling of realizing what those plumes meant, especially as I watched the horror on family member's faces, is something that has always been easy for me to recall. So, from 1986 forward I gave any Challenger memorials wide birth, and I avoided any other launches. That is, until 2003.
I was at a Communication Studies conference in Albuquerque, NM in February of 2003. I was feeling accomplished in both attending the conference and presenting my first paper. It felt like the dawn of a new era in my life. A sense of power and purpose and adventure attended my flight from Sacramento, my rental of a convertible Ford Mustang, and my presentation on the 1st wave feminist icon Inez Mulholland. Prior to leaving for my trip I had heard that I would be able to view the re-entry of the space shuttle Columbia quite clearly in the morning hours of the desert skies of New Mexico. The weather was going to be perfect. It seemed the right time to face my fears. I was in a cheap motel, my favorite kind, and in a place I had never been. The weekend brimmed with new beginnings for me as I immersed myself in this graduate school experience. Yes, I was with a man I should have broken up with a year earlier. He was a dangling modifier of sorts, awkwardly adding details to my life, but he was always good for an adventure, which is why he was there with me at all, and so we enthusiastically set the alarm in order to be up in time for the re-entry the following morning. I went to bed with nervous anticipation, both because of the conference and the Columbia viewing.
The desert morning was chilly and fresh so I dressed in the warmest clothes I had. Wrapping myself in the blazer I had brought for the conference, I aimed to hold on to the snugness I had attained in bed. Not just the warmth, but the safety too. I was nervous again. Anxious really. We waited. Cups of coffee in hand, made in the motel room, we stared up at the wide and empty morning sky. And then it appeared. The shuttle. Not the shuttle. Or not the shuttle as I had hoped, but the streaks. Those awful streaks, long and vicious. The plumes of white. So many of them. This time there was no confusion. I understood these marks against that vast blue. I knew how to read them. I felt so sick. I felt responsible. I had broken the covenant with myself. With the universe. I shouldn't have watched. And if my promise to the gods of human adventures hadn't been enough, my apprehension should have told me. Later I found out the crew had been doomed from take off, a tile or something had been broken off and had left the body of the shuttle vulnerable upon re-entry. I wept. It was so final. Like the Challenger. So goddamn final.
I have now and again tried to make sense of how these two shuttle explosions have affected me. Which is usually when confronted with the "break up footage". I know that when I unexpectedly stumble on pictures of the Challenger or the Columbia, I feel that ache, a tightness across my torso, a sudden weight in my stomach, even as my heart rises up and floats against my rib cage. The media anniversaries, especially ubiquitous concerning the Challenger, are events I actively avoid. I don't need them to be reminded. I cannot forget the tracing those shattered vehicles left, and how sharp and clear death is even when it baffles, when it exceeds the imagination. And the sky is always stunning to me in its vastness. I remember one clear day after a tennis practice at Sacramento City College, laying on the concrete looking up into the expanse, the blue was so sure of itself that not a cloud bothered it. It was as direct an experience of space one could get without leaving. An overwhelming infinity that pressed me against the ground even as my center fluttered from my vision shooting so high above me. I could barely stand after. I didn't need to look at that famous picture of Earth from space to know just how alone the universe might feel if we thought about it too much. To come back from space, at least in my mind, would be to find a center of certainty. A globe rich with color and life. Our blue home. That is something I also took away from those re-entries. I love my planet. I think this love, like other emotions we re-visit, are etched into who we are by what we go through. They are the visible marks of the ghosts that still haunt.
Challenger Crew:
Columbia Crew:
