My eyes are glued to a 24 inch television screen, zeroed in on Cape Canaveral. I am alone at a drawing table, hunched over, one eye on a portrait I’m sketching with oil pastels for a class assignment, the other watching history being made: A teacher shooting into space. Liftoff: 11:38 am. A rocket launches. A white totem against an azure sky, set sail for Haley’s Comet. A spark flies, imperceptible. Countdown, 73 seconds. A burst. Puffs of dark gray, a leak, a stream of fire. Candescent clouds combusting like a flaming dove, Mushrooming cotton balls smoldering in the air, falling, rolling, billowing upward in slow motion. I collapse in my chair, watching the blazing flares streaming down. Looping lines of glowing smoke fill the sky, etching outlines of swans and swirls, sparkling and shimmering in the sun. A rocket launches. The crowds in Boca Chica scream: “Go baby go!” 33 engines roar, a deafening boom. A black arrow soars against a turquoise horizon. A roman candle straight to the stars. A flame appears, and the dazzling projectile detonates instantaneously. I watch it explode on my phone. “Starship experienced what we call rapid unplanned disassembly,” the officials said. A fiery mishap. Wet particles drifted from the sky. “When dried, it was more of a dust. It was much finer than our local sand,” a witness noted. There was snow falling outside my window on January 28, 1986. Icy conditions for the launch. The Challenger experienced what we call loss of O-ring resiliency. Debris rained down on the Atlantic for hours after the explosion. I can hear the clatter made by my oil pastels as they fell to the hardwood floor and rolled to a stop. The sound of a single voice, saying “Uh-oh.” 7 echoes on sun split clouds: Luminescent. And how after that, nothing else was heard.
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Wow
Oh, this is raw. So real. I thought the same thing as you did. I compared the explosions. I was home lying on the floor so exhausted from the flu when Challenger burst with Krista McCullough aboard. When Starship burst the reporters just kept talking but none of them told me whether there were people onboard this time. I waited and waited and waited to hear those words finally that it was an unmanned flight of failure. Such a big poem.