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First Teacher in Space
00:05:58
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unidentified
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They're living under and enjoy the fruits that all the other, most of the other Caribbean nations enjoy. | |
| Retired General Mark Kimmett is the former Assistant Secretary of State for the George W. Bush administration. | ||
| His recent column that we've been talking about throughout this segment appeared in Politico. | ||
| If you want to read that column, it was January 7th. | ||
| And we always appreciate your time, sir. | ||
| Thanks for stopping by. | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Just clarification, it's in politico-EU, not in Politico. | ||
| Politico. | ||
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unidentified
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Thanks for having me. | |
| EU. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Today marks 40 years since the space shuttle Challenger broke apart and exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. | ||
| It was 1139 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 flashball 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? | ||
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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? | ||
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unidentified
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Apparently, 15,000 teachers applied from around the country. | |
| And Kristen McCullough 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 and the U.S. losing astronauts to tragedies as we tried to explore the final frontier as it was known? | ||
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unidentified
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Back in the 1960s, the second half of the 60s, people remember the Apollo 1 fire. | |
| It was a test of the capsule that would take people to the moon, and a spark on board the spacecraft when it was at the Cape ignited a fire and killed those astronauts. | ||
| It was also an enormous tragedy, but it was not a launch event. | ||
| There weren't people expecting a particular outcome. | ||
| Then came the successful Apollo missions. | ||
| Apollo 8, Christmas Eve on 1968, the first orbit of the moon, the photographs that came back of Earthrise that became iconic. | ||
| And then in July 69, the landing of Apollo 11, the first humans on the moon. | ||
| Apollo 13, there was a problem with the spacecraft, but all the astronauts came back safely. | ||
| So there was a growing sense that NASA had figured out how to operate safely in space. | ||
| And we'll be exploring the history of space travel at NASA on C-SPAN's American History TV on C-SPAN 2 for our viewers throughout the day on Saturday, this coming Saturday, starting at 8 a.m. Eastern. | ||