They touched the face of God

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

-- Ronald Reagan, January 28, 1986

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A quarter century has passed since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in the sky, live on cable television, with potentially the entire world a witness to the unthinkable.

I was an oblivious little boy back then, all of seven years old, but still today I vividly recall learning of the tragedy from a classmate in school, I suppose in much the same way those before me would have learned of the assassinations of John Kennedy in ’63 and John Lennon in 1980.

La navette Challenger a explosé...

“Challenger exploded,” my friend announced, arms outstretched far left and right in a mimicked re-enactment of disaster which, in retrospect, only an innocently unaware child would dare attempt in explaining the flying-then-fallen rocket’s demise.

The magnitude of the tragedy failed to register with my seven year-old self, but still, that moment, the moment I learned of the catastrophe in the sky, has stayed with me forever.

I don’t remember much about my time in Grade Two at École de la Rabastalière, in the suburbs of the giant Montreal metropolis.

Not my teacher’s name.

Nor where I sat. What I learned. What we did.

I remember none of my classmates.

Except for one—Jean-Philippe Guillaume—the boy who told the story of the space shuttle’s unimaginable end.

A quarter century later, I felt compelled to revisit the moment, prompted by its place atop the page as the cnn.com news story of the day, pushed to do so on the bleak anniversary of what should have been a momentous occasion in American history.

The video is haunting, with images far more difficult to watch today than ever they were as a seven year-old child, when the repercussions of the tragedy failed to register beyond the ball of smoke and fire and debris that materialized out of nowhere to blacken the morning January sky.

We watch without a word, as the astronauts emerge from their quarters at the Kennedy Space Center—smiling, laughing, waving—seven souls eagerly anticipating a fateful voyage to a new frontier, seven souls we know are taking the final steps to an eternal rest.

Our hearts palpitate as Mission Control counts down—to those watching in 1986, the final seconds to lift-off—to us, 25 years later, the fading seconds of seven brilliantly bright lights extinguished far too soon.

T-Minus four... three... two... one... And liftoff, liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission.

We silently anticipate the end, as the Space Shuttle Challenger roars into the sky, leaving in its wake the hopeful masses cheering its departure, never for a single, solitary second expecting its imminent disintegration into the sky.

But we know.

We know that in less than one minute, shock will cruelly find a startled nation, if not a startled world—from those watching on the ground in Cape Canaveral, to those tuning in on television in all corners of the country, to those across the border who will learn of the tragedy in a French-Canadian classroom, from the lips of a French-Canadian classmate.

We watch as the Space Shuttle Challenger ascends to the stars, still wondering how it is that a vessel so big could possibly pierce the clouds at the staggering speed of 2,257 feet per second.

Engines beginning throttling down now. At 94 percent.

We wait.

Engines at 65 percent. Three engines running normally.

We wait.

Then it happens.

A fireball engulfs the fuselage, in an instant erasing the Space Shuttle Challenger from view, replacing it instead with smoke, fire and debris, plus a million random questions from everyone wondering if what they think they just saw is really what they think just happened.


Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.

The cameras pan to the crowd, and that’s when the magnitude of the tragedy finally sinks in... the magnitude that escaped an oblivious seven year-old me a quarter century ago.

A mother and father, the parents of Christa MacAuliffe, a New Hamshire teacher who had earned her voyage to the stars as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space project, fall into each other's arms as the magnitude of the tragedy grips them in an instant.


Their daughter is on the Space Shuttle Challenger, and they have just watched her perish in the sky.

We have seen enough.

And as we pull ourselves from the images of the tragic fall of what was the Space Shuttle Challenger, we are haunted, even a quarter century later, by the last words Ronald Reagan spoke to a weeping nation on the night of January 28, 1986:

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."