STS-51L

I looked around on Saturday for anything I’d written around the Challenger accident, because a handful of anniversary stories reminded me that fully 20 years had passed, but I didn’t find anything.

In my professional writing, there’s almost never been any place for anniversary stories, because the commercial real estate industry has little interest in the past beyond last quarter or “what happened last year” at the end of each year, and even that would sometimes be set aside for “what various people predict for the coming year.”

A small part of the industry does renovation and adaptive reuse, and so in that sense cares about the past, but mostly as raw material. I can’t imagine running a commercial real estate story about the 20th anniversary of anything.

But Challenger explosion was of general interest, and the hook for this weekend’s stories were the present-day memorials. I went to work that day in 1986, like most people old enough to have been in the workforce, and I heard about it there. Someone down the hall somewhere said to someone else (not to me), “The Shuttle blew up.”

We had a rarely used TV in a room somewhere, and people milled in and out of that room to see what was being reported. Not much was, or could be. The TV reporters were in that spot of having to be on the air all the time, but having nothing new to report for long stretches of time. Later, President Reagan said appropriate words. I wondered then, and I wonder now, if such a speech honoring fallen astronauts was already on file somewhere in the White House – a reasonable bit of planning ahead, I’d think.

Curiously, I also remember waking up that morning and turning on the radio, which was close enough to do without getting up, and listening to it in bed for a short while (no kids to rouse or be roused by in those days). There was a short mention of another delay in the launch of the Shuttle, the latest of a number of delays – but only a few hours this time. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, and surely wouldn’t remember it now if the mission had gone well.