4 March

At just before 10 minutes in this video, the big fuel tank strapped to the Challenger Shuttle explodes. I remember when this happened (January 1986), I’d just finished high school and was working at the local corn cannery to make money for uni. It was shocking, and also the first flight to have a civilian onboard, a school teacher called Christa McAuliffe. So there was added drama. What’s much less well known is something even more horrible. It’s almost certain that the astronauts survived the explosion, in the crew compartment, and also that at least some of them were conscious for the next 2 minutes and 45 seconds, as it fell into the Atlantic Ocean, at 200 miles per hour. Lives that are disrespected by every unspeakable moron who says the Earth is flat, and that humans never went to the moon.