The Challenger Disaster Live On

The Challenger Disaster :
Twenty-five years ago today, Concord, New Hampshire, was abuzz with excitement as teacher Christa McAuliffe was about to make history.Thousands of educators had applied to be the first teacher in space, but NASA chose McAuliffe, a 10th-grade social studies teacher at Concord High School.Micaela Pond, who was 17 and McAuliffe's neighbor at the time, remembers getting a ride home one day from the teacher turned astronaut. Where were you when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 25 years ago? I was sitting on the gym floor of my middle school watching the teacher turned astronaut head into space.

It was one of those moments that shook the world and marked the lives of just about everyone who witnessed it.At 11:39 AM EST on January 28, 1986, a generation of kids had the image of the Challenger explosion burned into their memories where it would forever rest with similar world jarring events. In less than an hour, the Aubrey Fitch, a guided-missile frigate returning from the Bahamas, turned around to begin search-and-rescue operations for the Challenger shuttle.

It was the first ship on the scene, he said.

"We were expecting the worst," he said. "We were expecting to find bodies." From sunrise to sunset, Nelson and four enlisted men under him took turns looking through the ship's "big eyes," two 20-power, nitrogen gas-filled binoculars. The heavy, 30-inch-long binoculars, mounted on stationary pedestals, were typically used to identify other ships at sea.

But 25 years ago, the "big eyes" on the Aubrey Fitch were used to find remnants of a shuttle launch gone wrong.Nelson searched for reflections in the water, sunlight hitting metal pieces from the space shuttle. The Aubrey Fitch recovered large fuselage panels, propulsion components, tiles and an orbiter landing gear among several tons of evidence collected.

"I was constantly looking," he said. "Once you see it, you stay right on it."



Without turning his head, he said aloud the object's exact location and the officer on the deck would turn the ship into it.For Nelson, the first items recovered were the most memorable: an astronaut's helmet and a fecal bag.