Lest we forget...

[Kenneth Morgan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

[Salo]

Wow. Tough to forget when you didn't really know. Now I do. And now I won't. Thanks Kenneth.

[Steve T Power]

Then of course there's this event, whose anniversary happens to be tomorrow.

Watching this live on television as part of a science project in the third grade was one of those traumatizing experiences.

[Salo]

Jeez, that's it tomorrow, isn't it. I was in grade school too and on flag duty, so it was my duty to lower the flag to half mast.

[Dan Mancini]

I was in Geometry class when the made the announcement over the intercom. Drag.

[Gobear]

I was in Geometry class when the made the announcement over the intercom. Drag.

You sure you don't mean Challenger? I was 5 when Apollo 1 burned and I remember that the adults around me were very sad, but I have much more distinct memories of the 1969 moon landing.

[Dan Mancini]

I was in Geometry class when the made the announcement over the intercom. Drag.

You sure you don't mean Challenger? I was 5 when Apollo 1 burned and I remember that the adults around me were very sad, but I have much more distinct memories of the 1969 moon landing.

Yeah, I was referring to Steve's link, not Kenneth's. My bad.

[Paul Kile]

Wow. Tough to forget when you didn't really know. Now I do. And now I won't. Thanks Kenneth.

It's amazing how older milestones of the Space Program, both good and bad, tend to fade in memory to the point where the knowledge doesn't get passed on very well to subsequent generations.

I remember exactly where I was when I heard about the Apollo 1 fire. I was 13 and at a Civil Air Patrol meeting in Freeport, NY. In the middle of the meeting they called for us to all fall into ranks, then they held us at attention for 10 minutes in total silence. We all wondered what was going on. The Squadron Commander then came out and told us the astronauts were dead.

As for the Challenger disaster, I was sitting at my desk at work at Aerojet, when our admin came around and told everyone the shuttle had blown up. My first thoughts were shock and horror. My next thought (along with most of my co-workers) was hoping that it wasn't our engines that caused the disaster (no, it was the Thiokol solid boosters). A little crass, maybe, but a natural reaction working in Aerospace.