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Challenger

24 years ago today;

Mission Control: "Challenger, go at throttle up"

Commander Dick Scobee: "Roger go at throttle up"

Those were the last words heard from the Challenger crew on January 28, 1986. Then came an explosion, and the famous "Y" plume of smoke from the solid rocket boosters flying away aimlessly to nowhere.

via Remembering Challenger | Universe Today.

I remember that BBC's The Adventure Game was cancelled for an extended John Craven's Newsround.  I also remember President Reagan's address which was then and is now an amazingly crafted piece of political rhetoric (and was written by Peggy Noonan, a special assistant to Reagan). Part of it spoke to American schoolchildren and children the world over,

I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

and it finished by paraphrasing a sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, a pilot in the second world war, High Flight.

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."