It doesn't seem possible that it's been thirty years. I was 15 years old and had just gotten home from school, turned on the TV and saw that the Space Shuttle had broken apart. I cried watching the newscast. As I often did during that time of my life, I turned to music to try and cope with the tragedies that we're often unequipped to deal with. About a year before I had gotten in to Rush and had recently picked up Signals. It contained the song 'Countdown', which celebrates the US space program and is a chronicle of a shuttle launch.

Rush - Countdown

I've never been able to hear it since without thinking of the Challenger.
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I was a senior at Northern Illinois University. I was in a large lounge in the student center between classes watching with a couple hundred other students. One of those moments you never forget, as hard as you may try.
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I lived in Satellite Beach, yup named that because of our proximity to Canaveral / Kennedy. I was actually on the beach watching it when it blew up, had to ride my bike home right away to turn on the news, we all knew something happened, we had seen all the launches before that and ... it was quite different. The explosion was incredible and the shockwave shook the ground for a few seconds, everything was shaking and rattling.

While watching it on the news I was looking out our front window and you could see the pieces falling from the sky, the little contrails spiraling down, we lived about 1/2 mile from the beach, they had a lot of the beaches closed off while they collected pieces that washed up, one of the helmets that washed up and was in all the papers was found right behind a friend's house, Patrick Air Force Base was a couple miles from the house, that's where they brought all the pieces and assembled them in one of the hangers. That accident really shut down all the towns along the beach, most people either were in the Air Force or worked at Kennedy, a lot of people were out of work for a long time.
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Junior year at Boston University. It was a big deal in our area because Kristia McAuliffe was from Framingham, MA and was teaching in New Hampshire. Remember watching the explosion and not fully comprehending what was happening at the time. Lots of silence after that.
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I watched it from my cousins back yard in Melbourne FL even felt the explosion there. Went in to watch the news and see what was going on and not even 2 hours later they were announcing beach closures around that area.
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7th Grade in astronomy club. Still makes me a bit sad.
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Hard to believe it was that long ago. I was working my first "real" engineering job and sat at a window looking south. I happened to look out the window just in time to see it explode. The way the cloud of smoke hung in the air forever was the eeriest thing I think I have ever witnessed...

As it turns out, the lady that would later be my wife was sitting in a science class and her teacher had been one of the finalists to be the teacher that was on the crew.
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I was watching on the news before going to work, thinking that this could not be real.
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I was 11. My brother and I were home from school for some reason - maybe a snow day. We shared a room at the time and were excitedly watching the live launch on our tiny black/white tv. We were stunned and speechless when we saw the shuttle blow up.
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Junior in high school. We weren't watching it live, but as soon as we all heard, kids were gathering around in the rooms that had tvs. It hit close to home, as Ron McNair was from Lake City, SC (the biggest celebrity in our local area). They have a memorial in front of the public library now. It was even worse when we learned some of them could have survived the explosion and would've had to ride it out to splashdown. Very sad.
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