Like most people my age (39), in 1986 I was in class watching the Space Shuttle Challenger lift off when it blew up and freaked me the fuck out. I remember that the school principal immediately released us from class, called our parents and, in the following days, required each student to see a school counselor to judge how badly messed up we were from witnessing the tragedy.
That day has always stuck with me. Not so much because of what happened, but because it made me interested in the lives of those people that were on it. Of course it was because of teacher Christa McAuliffe that most every school in the US was watching the launch live, but the other astronauts: Greg Jarvis, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee and Ronald McNair, became almost mythical figures to me, these brave men and women who went up into space and who never got to come back down again.
The following video is only one of their stories, Ronald McNair's, only the second black man to go into space and who spent his life working toward a goal he set when he was just a kid in South Carolina.
It is beautiful and poignant and told by McNair's brother Carl.
It is worth watching.
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