3. What's the fastest you've seen a crowd go from excited to horrified?

What's the fastest you've seen a crowd go from excited to horrified?

So many school children were watching to celebrate McAuliffe's journey to space.

I was about 10 when it happened.

Shuttle launches were certainly cool back then... But the fact that McAuliffe was a teacher had really dialed things up in the classroom. There were various educational tie-ins and we'd spent the last week or so talking about the launch in school.

The day of the launch was super-exciting. They rolled-in one of those big ol' tube TVs on a metal cart. And because we didn't have enough TVs to go around we were combining classes and cramming in as many people as we could. Even the kids who weren't really into space were excited at the excuse to take a break from school-as-usual.

My classroom, at least, didn't go straight to horrified. I don't think we understood what had happened at first. I mean - we saw the explosion. Something obviously went wrong. But it was't clear how bad it was. They quickly turned off the TV and sent us to recess/lunch... So I guess this must've been around 10:00/11:00 in the morning. There were kids on the playground saying that everyone was dead... Or that they were all OK because it was just one of the rockets that exploded, not the shuttle... Or that they were all OK because they had an escape pod...

We didn't go back to class. They sent everyone home after lunch. I didn't find out what had actually happened, and that everyone was dead, until I got home that afternoon.

Somehow the fact that a teacher - not some mythical astronaut, but a regular teacher like you see every day in school - had died made it so much worse. So much more real.

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