Story by Alycia Gil
Photo Editor
Home sick from his fifth grade class on Jan. 28, 1986, 11-year-old Mr. Ray Rodriguez was mindlessly going on with his routine watching his cartoons expecting an ordinary day.
Then, with a brief warning, the news took over his cartoon channel. In fact, every station had the news on it, he said.
Video showing an explosion and smoke coming down like a two-spout waterfall filled the screen.
The space shuttle Challenger had exploded.
“Back then we didn’t have cable so most people only had channels 2 through 13 and every single channel was replying it from nine in the morning till late the next day,” he said.
Twenty-five years ago on January 28, 1986, seven astronauts, including the first civilian, a high school teacher from New Hampshire, boarded the Challenger expecting to make history. However, at 11:38 a.m. Eastern Time, the Challenger lifted off and 73 seconds later burst into pieces leaving no survivors. Many of the employees at Amat remember this tragic moment in their lives as children.
Mr. Jason Harris, Bishop Amat’s technology systems manager, remembers the tragedy vividly as well.
He was in the third grade before school in one of his school’s portable classrooms waiting for the Challenger to blast off into space.
Like many others around his age, his school watched the event because of Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire high school social studies teacher.
He was sitting in the classroom with two other classrooms when they started to watch it live on TV.
The space shuttle started to go up when there was a big explosion and parts started falling from the sky.
The teachers in the room seemed shocked at what they had just witnessed, while he and his fellow classmates had not yet understood what they just witnessed, he said. In minutes he said he could feel the teachers’ emotions and the mood in the room change.
“When I watch Discovery Channel or the news and they have specials about the Challenger or any other shuttle lifting off, I gets flashbacks of that day and how I had witnessed the tragic explosion,” he said.
Like Mr. Harris, religion teacher Mrs. Patricia Contreras was also in the third grade and vividly remembers this tragic event.
She had received newsletters in the second grade asking for nominations for the first teacher in space. She wanted to nominate her teacher.
When Vice President George H.W. Bush announced that McAuliffe was the winner of the contest, Mrs. Contreras was excited about the fact that there would be an ordinary person in space. It being a teacher was just a bonus.
NASA had planned on having McAuliffe teach her class from outer space, an idea that seemed too surreal, Mrs. Contreras said.
She was in her classroom early that morning waiting to watch history when they turned on the TV and witnessed the tragedy.
The mood in the room immediately changed, she said. Teachers were crying, kids, including Mrs. Contreras herself, had been crying, and everyone seemed extremely sad and confused, she said.
This was the first tragic news event she witnessed, she said.
Subconsciously she said she thinks this event contributed to her decision to become a teacher.
“I went through many slow deaths with people who were old and sick and we were aware of what was to come,” Mrs. Contreras said. “But this was the first time I had seen somebody that didn’t deserve to die so unexpectedly and it made me realize the fragility of life.”
