Francis here again for another Francis Friday. This time I have to ask, what is your ‘watershed moment’? That is, what is that one startling, unexpected event on the world stage that you will always remember where you were when it happened?

Every generation has these, and some of us have more than one. Our grandparents had the Bombing of Pearl Harbor, our parents had the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Our children had the World Trade Center bombing on 9-11 (and we did too of course), but that one ‘oh shit’ moment for us Generation Xers was the Challenger Disaster. A moment of sorrow that took place 35 years ago yesterday as I write this.

Any historian will tell you that the best sources for any event are those who were there when it happened. Those particular perspectives form the oral folklore that keeps such events truly alive, for a few generations at least. I believe that the full flavor of the feelings generated by such events can only be found there. History books tell a different tale altogether, and while they are good and necessary, they lose a great deal of the power of the moment. I didn’t quite understand that until The Challenger exploded.

For me I was in college, at Bellarmine, preparing to go to Production Management Class of all things. I had gone back to the dorm after my earlier class that morning as I had a little time in between, and turned on the teeny-weeny black and white TV there on my desk. No cable folks, no streaming, just over-the-air local broadcast channels. And I tuned in just after it happened, right around 11:45 EDT.

And yes, I was stunned.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen, I thought. This is the Age of the Enterprise, of boldly going where no man has gone before. (The TOS language would have been in my head as TNG would not premiere until almost two years later.) This is about us exploring the cosmos, increasing our knowledge. We are supposed to be in a new era of optimism, something we had only recently discovered we needed. The specter of the Cold War still very much in our daily lives. The TV movie The Day After was only three years in the past, and it scared the bejeezus out of me so bad that even talking about it to this day still frightens me. Those images are forever burned within my brain.

And so are the images of the Challenger Explosion.

I did go on to class that day, although I was tempted to skip it so I could stay and watch the continuing coverage. Just before I left my dorm room, I remember seeing the parachutes in the sky and hearing the rather brainless NBC commentators exclaiming “Look! Maybe someone survived!” Of course, it was only the rescue teams being deployed. Such tone deaf commentary proved that everyone had been gobsmacked into stupidity by what had just happened.

Walking up the hill to the Administration Building, everyone was talking. I even told some who hadn’t heard about it yet what I had seen. I was shocked by what had happened, yes, but life did go on. I didn’t need a safe space nor time off to meditate on what I’d seen. But I did sense a seismic change in both the world and myself. I was now a little less naive, a bit more jaded and worldly than I had been when I woke up that morning. I think the entire nation was too.

I have offered prayers for the repose of the souls of those space pioneers on many occasions since that day. They gave their lives for more than their country. They made the supreme sacrifice for knowledge, for growth, for science and for humanity itself. They were exemplars of those who used their God-given talents to the fullest extent possible, trying to bring about the greatest good possible. It was not about the technology that failed that day. It was about those who went ahead anyway, always knowing such a thing was possible. Despite what happened, we still kept going forward. Perhaps that is the best lesson of all here.

Below is a brief 35-year-later retrospective of the event, from NBC News, with whom I shared the moment on that day long ago: