The Challenger explosion happened 33 years ago today.

[musette_sf]

20. I remember it very well.

I was living in southwest Houston and working as a server at a sports bar/restaurant owned by Dan Patrick. (Yes, THAT Dan Patrick, who is now incomprehensibly the insane Lt Gov of Texas.)

I was relatively new to the place so I got the crappy shifts, and weekday lunchtime was the crappiest of the crappy shifts. Low volume and terrible tipping.

Being a sports bar, the place had a giant TV screen over the dining area. The explosion played out over and over, endlessly, over the big screen.

Sadly, I made the best tips that day that I ever made on that shift. People left work for the day, started drinking immediately, and stayed all afternoon into the evening. Houston, of course, is emotionally tied as a city to NASA, so it felt personal to us.

Such a waste, only because a president* wanted a positive story right THEN just before SOTU, regardless of what the experts said about the risks of the launch under those weather conditions.

(Many years later I participated in an offsite business skills training session, in which the group was broken into teams to do an exercise on decision making and risk taking. The scenario was an auto race with dragsters, and your team had to decide whether a certain super high performance car should race or not. If it didn't race, the owner stood to lose a pile of dough. Just before the analysis for the decision began, the facilitator added to the scenario that there had been "freezing conditions the night before", and this particular configuration had not been raced before under those conditions. Being the only person on my team old enough to remember the specifics reported in real time, I told them, "This is Challenger! We will not race!" So the facilitator went around the room and asked each team for their go/no-go decision. We were the only team that gave a no-go. And then he said, "This is the only team that chose correctly. This is the Challenger space shuttle scenario." )