When the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster happened, for many of you, it was your first "shared experience." One of those times when people around the world remember exactly where they were and what they were doing.
The tragedy so many of us watched live, is now history for a whole new generation.
The students at Stewart Middle School in Tampa watched the disaster unfold on television. It's a video with images of the space shuttle Challenger breaking apart 73 seconds after launching, killing seven people. Today, it's just a history lesson.
But for people like Ava Gordimer, it's all too real. "We heard the news over the loud speaker in my sixth-grade classroom. I remember we were all very surprised we couldn't believe it was actually happening."
Gordimer, now a teacher herself, remembers being excited that a teacher was going to space. She was even holding out hope that the crew had found a way to escape before the explosion. "It was really unreal and I think that's why people kept on watching it over and over again just because it was just a complete shock."
Antonio Paris is the space programs director at MOSI. "The whole world, not just the United States was excited that a teacher was selected to go on this mission. So back then it was one of the most widely observed launches in space shuttle history."
"We got the afternoon off to watch the space shuttle go up." George Munson remembers being active-duty military at the time, based in Germany. "We were all sitting there, a bunch of guys sitting in a room and we were like whoa it took off and then halfway through it blew up, it just went quiet."
Today kids at this magnet school for space and technology pay tribute to a teacher they never knew, a tragedy they've only seen pictures of, but a lesson that lives on.
