When We Left Earth – Discovery
I’ve been watching the space travel history program on Discovery HD called When We Left Earth. It was absolutely fascinating to learn about the history of the entire US space program from Mercury to International Space Station. I was an avid fan of NASA when I was growing up (who wasn’t?) so it was really interesting to revisit my memories and emotions of the Challenger explosion (1986, I was in 8th grade in Texas) as well as the Colombia disintegration (2003, married, Chicago). I still remember our math (or science?) teacher walking into our class in 1986 telling us that Challenger had exploded and we all couldn’t believe it. If I remember correctly they let us go home early and the whole walk home my friends and I kept thinking they must’ve survived, they must’ve ejected not knowing that there were no escape/safety systems at the time. We stayed glued to our televisions the entire night waiting for some news to give us hope. I found the Colombia incident to be just as shocking but this time found out from Internet news sites after I woke up and had breakfast. The same types of feeling ensued 🙁
I definitely enjoyed the detailed interviews they did with players during each of the major moments. Armstrong’s views on the moon landing. Loved hearing from the real Gene Kranz and have more respect for Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and how much it felt connected to the real events.
If you get a chance, it’s worth watching!
I think I’ll definitely have to check the series out. I was all to close to much of it growing up going to space camp in elementary school, my middle school being named Challenger, yes after the shuttle, and high school Virgil L. Grissom after one of the astronauts. I even recall it being a tense time after Colombia among some friends and their families as their parents had worked on the shuttle and boosters personally. Definitely will be giving it a watch.
Interesting. The neighborhood we lived in when I was in high school was also named after the Challenger astronauts. I lived on Jarvis Lane 🙂