I watched live from my first-grade class as Challenger exploded - CNET

Before Challenger, life was literally all just child's play for me. After Challenger, I was not only aware of the unthinkable breadth of the world and the universe, but also of how brutal and cruel it all can be. I still remember some of the hideous jokes kids and even some remarkably crass adults told in the wake of the tragedy. They're not worth repeating here, but they still make my stomach hurt.

There's a weird thing about my memory of the Challenger disaster, though. Up until I started going back and watching old news videos from 1986 and researching McAuliffe, I remembered that she was from my home state of Colorado. If you had asked me a few months ago about her, I would have told you that I remember her clearly, how she was a teacher from Boulder, I thought, and how she was supposed to be the first teacher in space.

When the space shuttle was new (photos)

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But McAuliffe never taught in Boulder, or anywhere else in Colorado. She taught in New Hampshire, and so far as I've been able to tell, she never lived anywhere west of Virginia.

It's possible I might have just misunderstood something I saw on the local news about the Challenger accident when I was 6 and held on to that bit of bad information, but I wonder if I didn't intealize the trauma a little more than I realized, and maybe unconsciously, because it's such a big personal milestone in my memory, I actually wanted her to be closer to me.

There's also been some recent research on memory that seems to indicate that the more we access a memory, the less accurate that memory might be. Since this is the first news event I remember really experiencing in the moment, it's something I've talked about and thought about more than just about any other memory I have from the 1980s. Each time I've remembered it, I may have just been playing a game of telephone with my own brain and getting further from the actual truth.

To try to get back to the reality of that day, and to commemorate the sacrifice of seven brave people who sought to better understand the universe -- not for personal gain but for the betterment of us all, I dug up some old news footage from that day and did my best to re-create it as I can best remember experiencing it in the below mini-podcast.