Not only did they broadcast the explosion they also caused it. Haha(not funny)
Richard Feynman was the one who let slip innocently what the cause was during an international press conference and made a lot of people in Washington very very mad.
Basically, the Whitehouse pushed NASA to launch despite the weather being too cold and that caused an expansion joint of an SRB to fail.
Feynman showed the world what happens to the expansion joint material by putting it in some ice water for five minutes during the press conference and showed it crumbled after he took it out of the glass.
That man was an international treasure and I miss him very much.
We watched it live in elementary school, most of the kids didn't get what had happened right away. Our teacher was just standing there stunned until an announcement came on the intercom asking all the teachers to turn it off. They didn't say anything to us, just tried to pretend like we didn't just watch people blow up live.
The engineers knew! They begged them to stop the launch, but of course, no one makes the wheels not capitalism stop rolling! profit progress at all costs!
I think I was in 7th grade. We were watching. Right in front of our eyes and could hardly believe it. Everyone inhaled sharply and then a couple of short screems, then silence. After a good 5 minutes, our teacher came to his senses, turned off the TV, and started talking about being right with god because you never know when it's your turn.
The flight, and the astronauts’ lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch. After Challenger was torn apart, the pieces continued upward from their own momentum, reaching a peak altitude of 65,000 feet before arching back down into the water. The cabin hit the surface 2 minutes and 45 seconds after breakup, and all investigations indicate the crew was still alive until then.
We were led out of our classrooms to watch it since we lived in FL. When the launch went pear-shaped, nobody really understood what had happened, we just thought it was part of the fuel tanks dropping away. We went back in, sat down and continued our day. I don't think the teachers ever told us something went wrong and I found out about it that night at home.
The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US's program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn't care about human lives.
I was only 4 years and 4 months old, I can barely remember anything of that time.
But when Columbia was en route to enter the atmosphere, I was outside on the front lawn watching, since it was re-entering over my area of Texas at a pretty favorable viewing angle.
I was so fucking happy to see such a momentous occasion...until it started breaking up. I knew something was wrong, but my brain couldn't piece it together, until the ship started breaking apart into visibly distinct fireballs. It passed over the horizon, and I was stunned. I ran back into my friend's living room, and continued watching the coverage, now very sombre.
It was 17 years and 4 days after Challenger. I was 21. That shit is burned into my memory. Especially since 9/11 was less than 18 months prior, which I also watched live.
i wasn't born back then, but i remember watching a punky brewster episode rerun when i was a kid that was about it. probably the first time i heard about the challenger disaster.
I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn't any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.
And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.