Today, the frontier is space and the boundaries of human knowledge. Sometimes, when we reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain. Our nation is indeed fortunate that we can still draw on immense reservoirs of courage, character and fortitude - that we are still blessed with heroes like those of the space shuttle Challenger.

- President Ronald Reagan's speech on the Challenger Disaster, three days later at a memorial service held in Houston, Jan. 31, 1986.

It seems to be a day of reminders of youth. When I was little, my mum used to take my brother and I to the local library regularly. I used to pick out nice colourful books and I used to pick up books on space. I love space and I loved the idea of space travel. I remember one book I picked out on space and read more times than I could count and the one page, and I can actually visualise the page in front of me, had a picture of the Challenger crew. This fascination with space continued and I used to love school trips to the Science Museum in London because of their section on space. Though my fascination is not so intense as when I was younger, I still find it all amazing. On one of our holidays, in Florida, we visited the Kennedy Space Center and before the summer, I was trying to plan out where I wanted to visit but was told [by my dad] that I couldn't go all the way to Houston from Rhode Island just to visit the Space Center, but I would have. That summer after camp, I stayed with Lemmy in Clark and met her best friend JP who loves space. He has pictures of crews on the wall and I knew one of the pictures was of the Challenger crew. I spend nearly an hour reading one of his space books whilst relaxing in his new chair that he bought because it was like you were in space.
This evening Channel 4 broadcast a factual drama on the Challenger disaster. I was glued to the sofa, apart from when our house was so ridiculously cold I had to move to make a cup of tea. It was so interesting and maddening at the same time. Morton Thiokol, in Utah, were commisioned to make the rockets that boost the shuttle into space and then drop away. Utah is landlocked so they sent them by train to NASA, in five segments and they were then joined together. There were two O rings on each one and it prevented leakage. A year and two days before the Challenger launch, an engineer at Morton Thiokol figured out there was a problem with the O rings; but nothing was done about it. The Challenger launch was delayed twice before the actual launch and the engineers at Morton Thiokol tried to stop the launch due to very cold temperatures; the colder the temperature the more gas will escape a leak in the faulty O rings. It didn't work. The launch went ahead and killed seven astronauts including Christa McAuliffe who was part of the Teacher in Space program.
As I was watching the programme, I was getting angrier and angrier that for many reasons the launch had gone ahead and the loss of life could have been prevented. Lucy walked in and asked if I was getting angry again, the only response she got from me was more yelling at the tv. It's sad that these astronauts lost their lives in a disaster than could have been prevented and that it took this for NASA to redesign. So at this point, twenty years and five days after the disaster, I take a moment to appreciate and celebrate the aspirations and dreams of those seven astronauts, dreams of space discovery and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

"We to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

John F. Kennedy on the US "race to the moon", 1962.