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Challenger's Mission Lost
00:04:51
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unidentified
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Today has been working on trying to avoid a partial government shutdown. | |
| A vote to advance a six-bill funding package to continue operations past Friday night at midnight failed by a vote of 45 to 55. | ||
| 60 votes were needed to move forward. | ||
| At issue is funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes immigration officials and ICE. | ||
| Democrats are insisting that money for the agency be stripped out of the minibus package. | ||
| According to news reports, the White House appears to be open to that idea. | ||
| We'll continue to bring you updates as the government shutdown approaches. | ||
| And you can keep an eye on our government shutdown clock, showing the amount of time Congress has left to act on the bottom right of your screen across the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Today marks 40 years since the space shuttle Challenger broke apart and exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. | ||
| It was 11:39 a.m. Eastern on January the 28th of 1986, when the seven members of the crew, as Ronald Reagan would later tell America, slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. | ||
| Joining us to discuss the anniversary is Florida State University History Professor Ronald Dole. | ||
| And Professor Dole, it was one of those days where people remember where they were when it happened. | ||
| Where were you when it happened? | ||
| What do you remember about that day? | ||
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unidentified
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It's indeed a flashbowl memory event. | |
| And I was lucky in one way to be a member of the press corps and as a historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, one of NASA's main facilities. | ||
| But I was there for the Voyager 2 spacecraft, the unmanned spacecraft encounter with the planet Uranus, the first time that any spacecraft had reached there. | ||
| It was an extraordinary time for discovery and then an absolute tragedy when the news broke in the press room at JPL. | ||
| What was your immediate reaction? | ||
|
unidentified
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There was shock and there was powerful emotion. | |
| NASA is in some ways a large community. | ||
| Certainly 40 years ago, people, if they didn't know others, they didn't know that the astronauts on board the shuttle, some of the planetary scientists who were at JPL had trained some of the astronauts who were part of the Apollo program. | ||
| What would it be like to do geology on the moon? | ||
| So it was the kind of tragedy at JPL that we experience when there's a loss, an unexpected loss within a family. | ||
| What was the Challenger's mission that day? | ||
| Why was it going up? | ||
|
unidentified
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Among all the shuttle missions had a number of components and goals, but one of the key ones was to bring the first civilian into space, the first teacher in space, which was something that President Ronald Reagan was going to announce in the State of the Union address. | |
| And it was clear that one of the main strengths of that particular mission would be to demonstrate the reliability of the shuttle, access into space, the ability of a civilian, a teacher coming out of our school system, to be doing a classroom from space. | ||
| Her name, Kristen McAuliffe. | ||
| How did she get chosen for the Challenger mission? | ||
|
unidentified
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Apparently, 15,000 teachers applied from around the country. | |
| And Kristen McCalla had a lot of energy, was able to share her enthusiasm particularly well, was suited for the physical rigor of doing astronaut training. | ||
| All those factors came together. | ||
| When that moment happened and the country saw the tragedy of the Challenger exploding, you mentioned you were shocked. | ||
| What was the history to that point till 1986 of NASA? | ||
|
unidentified
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We need this now to hear from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Pride, speaking to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. | |
| We expect him to address the recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis and involve federal immigration enforcement agents. | ||
| You're watching live coverage. | ||
| This is exactly the group therapy session that I needed. | ||