One (of the many) Reasons Gen Xers Are the Way They Are

Photo of space shuttle toys and Crayola markers on a wooden surface.

Where were you 40 years ago? I was sitting in my fourth grade classroom watching an historic space shuttle launch on television. I can tell you this because like many kids who were in elementary school in January of 1986 that day is forever seared into my brain. That’s because on January 28, 1986 the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launching killing all the astronauts on board.

What you might not realize if you weren’t in elementary school at that time, is that kids across the country were watching the launch live. Not only that but we knew the name of every astronaut on board that doomed flight because we had been studying and learning about them for weeks.

Apparently NASA had launched a nationwide education campaign connected with that particular space shuttle launch. What you might not know or remember if you weren’t an elementary school student at that time was that one of the astronauts on the Challenger was Christa McAuliffe who was to become the first teacher in space. If you were in elementary school at the time you likely remember this well, because in the weeks leading up to the launch you learned everything there was to know about Christa McAuliffe.

What wouldn’t be learned until much later was that the launch never should have happened that day. It was unusually cold that morning at Cape Canaveral. By NASA’s own guidance the flight should have been scrubbed due to the temperature. But this launch was a very big deal. School children across the country were ready to tune in and watch it live. Probably not since the Apollo moon landing had there been such a rapt audience for a space program event. The decision was made to go ahead with the launch despite the chilly temperature. And as we would all learn later when physicist Richard Feynman shrunk some o-rings by dropping them in a glass of ice water, this was a very tragic decision.

They went ahead with the launch, the space shuttle exploded on live television and millions of school kids watched it happen, and then they watched it again and again, because this was the television news, after all, and they do like get as much traction as they can out of their footage. Meanwhile a group of nine and ten year-olds sat their stunned as our teacher stammered and tried to make things right.

Later we would decamp to the cafeteria where our principal would play the VHS tape he had recorded of the broadcast while doing his best to explain to a bunch of traumatized children what had just occurred. What I’m saying is basically the entire school day revolved around watching a bunch of people who we knew all about die, over and over again.

Look, I’m not going to pretend that the Challenger disaster can entirely explain why Generation X is the way that it is, but at least for a portion of us it had a huge impact on us. Personally, I have absolutely no interest in watching a space launch live. I’m fine with waiting to make sure everything went smoothly and then watching the replay, but I absolutely do not need to subject myself to the stress of watching a live launch. But in a much broader way it was a mass traumatizing event in an era where no one had ever heard of a grief counselor. It affected a small segment of a small and often overlooked and forgotten generation, but for those of us who did it is probably one of the defining moments of our childhood. Certainly for me it was the single most memorable school day.