PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Kristin McPherson said she can still recall sitting inside her classroom at Limestone Community School, her eyes glued to a television screen as the space shuttle Challenger broke apart on Jan. 28, 1986.
“I can still hear the gasps of her horror all across the room,” she recalled. “We were crowded into the first grade classroom because we only had one TV, so the sound of crying and shrieking was just so loud.”
McPherson said that her family had just settled in at Loring Air Force Base after moving to Maine from California.
“So when I first came to class that day, I thought we were going to watch a cartoon,” the 40-year-old recalled recently.
Leo Stacey, 8, stands in front of an exhibit of one of the space shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in this undated photo. Stacey, who attends school in SAD 1 in Presque Isle, had his interest in space ignited after a trip to Florida with his family several years ago.
(Courtesy of Channa Jackson)
Instead, McPherson’s teacher told the classroom that they were going to watch the launch, which was scheduled to carry Payload Specialist Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire resident who would have been the first teacher in space. A number of schools across the nation were showing the liftoff to students in their classrooms. What the students saw, however, was the shuttle breaking apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members. The space shuttle program was halted for two years after the tragedy and officially came to an end in 2011, 30 years after it began.
Despite the lull in space travel after the program shutdown, interest in what is beyond Earth’s orbit has been reignited by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who launched a Tesla into space on Feb. 6 atop SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The car is sporting a mannequin named Starman. It is the most powerful rocket in use today. Its successful launch was a significant step forward for SpaceX and Musk’s eventual goal of sending people to live on Mars, according to the founder.
Karen Cyr of Caribou, who homeschools her 7-year-old son, Brian, said he has had some interest in space travel in the past, but that his interest has grown in the past few weeks.
“He has a map of the solar system in his room, and he knows the names of all the planets,” she said. “But when that rocket launched, we watched it on the internet together and he just became really hooked on it. He watched it over and over. It actually was really great, because I took him to the library the weekend after the launch for a separate event and while we were there he asked me for a book on space.”
Brian said that he “loves” studying the planets
“I love Saturn,” he said, because of “all of its rings.”
The home schooled pupil said that he and his mother have not spent that much time studying life on other planets, but he currently is skeptical that anyone “can really live on Mars.”
Leo Stacey, 8, who attends school in SAD 1 in Presque Isle, also has taken an interest in the new rocket.
Stacey said that after hearing about the planned SpaceX launch, he couldn’t wait to see it. The youth said he was in disbelief when Musk launched “his own car” along with the rocket, and then began looking at as many of the pictures of the journey as possible until the live internet feed was cut off.
He said that his interest in space took off after a trip to Florida with his family several years ago. The journey included a tour of NASA, which Stacey said included a talk with a former Aroostook County resident who now works there. Stacey quickly began studying everything he could about space flight, including the history of events such as the 1969 moon landing and the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
The 8-year-old said that he is interested in the possibility of exploring future travel to Mars, which he said he could see happening “if the people planning to live there have the right stuff.”
