35 years since Challenger launch disaster: ‘Never forgotten’
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA leaders, retired launch directors, families of fallen astronauts and space fans marked the 35th anniversary of the Challenger disaster on Thursday, vowing never to forget the seven who died during liftoff.
The pandemic kept this year’s remembrance more muted than usual.
Barely 100 people — all masked and seated or standing far apart — gathered in front of Kennedy Space Center’s Space Mirror Memorial. The late morning ceremony was held almost exactly the same time as the accident shortly after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986.
Among the attendees: Donna Smith, visiting from Florida’s Gulf Coast to “make sure they’re never forgotten.” She was a high school student when the crew was lost; the sky was so clear that frigid morning that she could see the doomed launch all the way across the state.
The widow of Challenger commander Dick Scobee quietly observed the anniversary from her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In a recent interview, June Scobee Rodgers said the presence of teacher Christa McAuliffe on the flight added to the crew’s lasting legacy.
Scobee Rodgers, herself a longtime educator, said her husband was assigned the teacherin-space flight because of her own career. NASA figured “he would have compassion for a teacher,” she told The Associated Press.
A social studies teacher in Concord, New Hampshire, McAuliffe was going to perform experiments and offer lessons from space.
Scobee Rodgers helped establish the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in the wake of the accident, along with the other Challenger families. She said that helped all of them heal and “move forward.”