Can't remember Challenger as I was merely 3.5 years old. And since I wasn't a US kid nor even at school, I mercifully escaped that horror: the perfect trauma of a full and entire generation of kids, talk about a perfect media shitstorm orchestrated by NASA against their will. I mean, had the previous Shuttle flight exploded with that fucking politician onboard, at least the kids wouldn't be watching live with their teachers at school. But no: it had to be Challenger with Christa McAuliffe onboard, the good girl everybody liked. Just to traumatize all the poor kids. Including Punky Brewster, who needed Buzz Aldrin to heal the pain.
Accidents Happen: Directed by Art Dielhenn. With George Gaynes, Soleil Moon Frye, Susie Garrett, Cherie Johnson. Punky's dream is to become an astronaut when she grows up. When she sees the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle on TV, she is devastated.
www.imdb.com
(imagine: you and your sister are watching on of those syndicated american shows on french TV - and all of sudden, boom - you realize it is talking about the Challenger disaster. WTF ??!!)
Same for Chernobyl, can't remember the horror live.
By 1988-89 however I was just old enough to be thoroughly traumatized by these two disaster striking visual sights, printed in countless magazines, old and new
- Chernobyl red-and-white smoke stack standing over the blackened nuclear inferno of the eviscerated reactor
- Challenger Y-shaped cloud of hypergolics and hydrolox propellants and debris. As seen from the weird angles of The Cape ground tracking cameras it just made no sense for a 7-year old.
Those two striking pictures burned into my young mind and truly scared the shit out of me for the next decade.
Thinking about it, I was lucky enough - as a young aviation buff - to remain blissfully unaware of a third visual horror (late August 1988): the Ramstein disaster Frecce Tricolori Aermacchis slamming into each others - and then crashing into the crowd below, killing 70 poor souls - burned to cinder.
Everybody had cameras pointed at the italian acrobatic team climactic moment - and everybody got instead a triple explosion with debris flying around plus yellow flames. Plus three dead pilots - and the worst was to come.
Geez, I was lucky enough to be blissfully unaware of that abomination until the Internet came a decade later.
Back to SpaceX...
