(no subject)

[asterroc]

Just watched the last Space Shuttle launch, Atlantis, on TV.

In my entire life I have now watched a grand total of three Space Shuttle launches (all on TV):
* Challenger, 1986
* Discovery, 2005
* Atlantis, 2011

According to my recollection, I was in third grade when my teacher decided that we would all crowd around the little 10" classroom TV to watch the first teacher go into space. We all know how that ended. I remember the entire classroom being silent for a long time before my teacher said anything.

For nearly two decades after that I was mostly against human spaceflight. It cost too much money, there was too little return on investment, and it was too risky, said the emotional side of me. The intellectual side said that others found it inspiring so we should continue human spaceflight to drive funding of real astronomy, and I also thought it was important to someday colonize other places than Earth so we must start that somewhere.

2005 was Discovery's "Return to Flight" mission, after the 2003 Columbia disaster. That summer I happened to be teaching astronomy at a nerd camp, so my TA on his own initiative arranged to have the class crowd around a TV screen. He and I stood in the back of the classroom chanting to each other, "I hope we don't traumatize them, I hope we don't traumatize them." Thankfully, we did not.

In 2008 the first teacher to actually go into space, Barbara Morgan, originally a backup for Christa McAuliffe and actually flew on Endeavour in 2007, addressed the National Education Association in Washington DC. I remember little of her speech, other than that it was inspiring.

Today I watched Atlantis launch on TV, the last ever Space Shuttle mission. My heart was in my throat and tears in my eyes, hoping that this would not be another disaster. Atlantis did launch successfully at 11:29am (EST). More than an hour later now, I'm not sure if it's already in orbit, or if it's still climbing.

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

A Space Shuttle hits orbit less than 10 minutes after it launches (!), so it's already there. I don't know if it's hooked up with the space station yet or not, though.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I saw the Challenger launch; I was a month shy of three years old, and my parents happened to have left the TV on and left me alone in the room. (Or, alternatively, I saw it over and over on the news throughout the day, but didn't see the actual event. In any case...) My parents still talk about how I had nightmares about that for months afterwards, and would see ghosts of the astronauts--and especially the teacher--in every glass reflection, which I do kind of vaguely remember. The ghosts thing apparently got bad enough that they almost put me in therapy for it.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I think the Challenger disaster affected me internally/mentally even more than 9/11, though 9/11 undoubtedly affected the world that I live in much much more.

The main effect that 9/11 had for me was to bring my pacifist beliefs into question. My pacifist beliefs come from my father, who was nearly drafted for the Vietnam War. He had a very low draft number so as soon as he found out the draft was happening he signed up for the National Guard in the morning. And when he went home he found his draft notice in his mailbox, and he ended up having to go to court to prove that he had signed up for the National Guard *before* he found out that he was drafted.

If there were ever a situation where I personally were drafted (and as a woman this is very unlikely), I would attempt to get conscientious objector status, and if not possible then I would draft-dodge and likely be put into jail. This is a much better option to me than supporting war and violence in any capacity. It's not that I don't want to be injured, it's that I don't want to support war, so I wouldn't be willing to be an officer, scientist, engineer, or anything. I'm not even comfortable celebrating Veterans' Day and Memorial Day.

9/11 called these beliefs of mine into question, as I knew strategically that it is important that the US show its enemies that we are not willing to accept such actions, otherwise more violence will ensue in the future. But that just made me question one specific thing (whether US should retaliate), while the Challenger disaster shaped my mindset from 1986 until 2008 (when I attended the first NASATweetup and got the chance to ask the astronauts who performed the last ever servicing of the HST what they thought of human vs. robotic spaceflight).

[sildra.livejournal.com]

The thing about Challenger is that I was so young when it happened that, although I was very traumatized by it at the time, I got over it. I mean, I hadn't even started preschool yet--a lot of kids don't have any memories of the age, let alone random memories of stuff they saw on TV, traumatic though it was. I don't even know why I was so certain that the Challenger explosion was real--I have this memory of telling my parents about it, and being told it was a fictional TV thing, and insisting it was real, until finally they saw it on the news, too, and believed me.

I was raised in a pacifist-sympathizing household, but not a pacifist household, and 9/11 happened at the start of my sophomore year at a Quaker-heritage college, so I hadn't yet solidified to what degree I was or was not a pacifist. I think I'd still say I'm pacifist-sympathizing but not truly pacifist when it comes to global politics--which is to say I think violence is almost never the correct course of action, including most of the places I've seen it used in my adult life, but I will concede that there are times when one party or another is forced into having to do something violent, although I do have a lot more respect for people who are more pacifistic than me than for people who are less. For myself I'm probably enough of a pacifist at this point that I would avoid personally participating at all costs. (Including that I refuse to apply for certain types of industry jobs, and I would take the risks necessary to dodge a draft if they ever decided to draft women of my age.) So, 9/11 didn't really shake my core beliefs, but rather was something that happened at just the right stage in my life that the event and its aftermath are pretty well incorporated into my beliefs.

9/11 was scary, certainly. I was in Philly at the time, and we'd see all the fighter planes flying over, patrolling the corridor between DC and NYC. But somehow, once I knew everyone in my family was safe, it became distant enough that it wasn't immediately scary--and I think that's the difference between being almost-three and being eighteen years old. Challenger was probably the first disaster I ever saw--it was a year and a half before my first earthquake, even--and because of that it was really traumatic at the time, even though, unlike 9/11, it wasn't a direct threat to me.

If I have to pinpoint the most scary/traumatic thing I saw on the news growing up, though, it would be the Rodney King riots, where a random guy got pulled out of his car and beaten to death. I was 9 years old, and I didn't know that was a neighborhood my family never drove through (except that it's actually where my family usually has to serve jury duty), so it had a certain immediacy to it of local proximity combined with the scariness of me hearing about it as a young kid. But in terms of effect on my world view, I think ultimately it just became one of many, many data points causing my policy of staying away from all protests, especially in LA.