1. 1
Joseph Perreault
Frame Shift Essay
ENG102-09, Perreault
1/14/17
I don’t remember much of anything about that year. It’s strange to think that an entire year of
one’s life—even one’s early life—can be reduced to a vague sense about a time, a few images, a
sense of place, and a few ideas about the music you heard on the radio or the shows you
remember watching on television. I had to look up the date to even remember how old I was.
Seven. I had just turned seven exactly two months to the cold day in January any American who
was alive that day surely remembers, and I remember that day, or at least a few moments from
it more vividly than I can remember anything from that whole year of my life.
I was in second grade, and when I thought back to this memory, I even had to strain to
remember the name of my second-grade teacher—Mrs. Murphy. What I do remember vividly
was that a classmate’s mother used to volunteer at the school—Mrs. Van Tassel—and she was
the one who wheeled the television into our classroom that morning. It was a huge deal.
Everyone had been talking about it all year, especially in school, because our teachers well all
ecstatic about the whole thing. President Reagan was talking about it. There simply wasn’t any
thought of the possibility that it would end the way it did—none. There wasn’t any mystery in
space flight anymore. We’d mastered it. Or the grown-ups had anyway. At 11:38 on the 28th of
January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida (Logsdon,
345). My second-grade class at Memorial School in Natick Massachusetts was watching—
everyone in the school was watching, I think. Christa McAuliffe had become a bit more than
just a national hero in the region—she was a New Englander, and a teacher, and I think there
was a special pride among our teachers, and in many schools. A minute after Challenger lifted
off, we watched the shuttle explode.
2. 2
I still remember the direction I was sitting in the classroom I can hardly remember. There
weren’t any cries or outbursts or tears; I wouldn’t even say there was shock. It was more like
confusion. I knew right away that they were all dead, and I think everyone did. But a classmate
asked the question—as if to confirm that what we all knew had happened had actually
happened. “Are they all gone?” I’m not sure who answered that question, Mrs. Murphy, Mrs.
Van Tassel? I don’t know. And I don’t know how they could have answered. In fact, I can’t
remember anything else from that day, but that day left a far larger impact than I was able to
comprehend for many years.
There’s no way that at seven I was sophisticated enough to understand what I was
processing at the time. I suppose more than anything it was the revelation of the fallibility of the
entire adult world. This had been planned at the highest levels—President Reagan, NASA,
Congress. They’d spent years planning that mission. We’d heard about it on the news
constantly. To see it explode in front of us like that? How could that have happened?
That night, President Reagan canceled his State of the Union address. Instead he chose to
address the nation from the White House, giving one of the most emblematic speeches of a
career marked by oratory brilliance. The precocious writer of that speech, a young Peggy
Noonan, also went on to a career marked by a certain brilliance, yet she may have never again
written anything with such a large and enduring impact. But I didn’t remember that speech at
all—not until earlier this year when my older brother emailed me a link to the video from the
Reagan library. As an adult, I was floored by it. I know I must have been watching at seven, but
how could anything from that day leave the impact that the explosion had?
I’ve listened to that speech a few times now, and though I think it was about as exactly
perfect a message one could have crafted in four hours on that day to that mourning nation,
there’s one line in it that bothers me—or at least it strikes me as being dangerously specious.
3. 3
“The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted; it belongs to the brave” (Reagan). It sounds like
a beautiful truism on its surface, but there’s absolutely no guarantee of it. The future belongs to
the people who make it there, and though it would be nice if those people are indeed brave, that
eventuality is not a given. History shows us this with certainty. I could not have understood
that at seven. Who could? I was probably just trying to figure out, as everyone else was, how all
those grown-up, smart, powerful, respectable people could have been so wrong.
For months on the news there were talks of investigations into the disaster. The shuttle
program was grounded indefinitely. But President Reagan continued to be just as adamant as
he was on the date of the explosion: we were not stopping anything. We’d figure out what went
wrong, fix it, and go back into space. That was the conviction. That part may have been difficult
for a seven-year-old to process—why was that so important? To the grown-ups, though, it
clearly was.
“Our hopes and journeys,” as Reagan had eloquently put it, would continue two years
later when Shuttle Discovery lifted off on September 29, 1988 (Logsdon, 345). I don’t remember
watching the launch. I’m sure all of the teachers were hesitant to take the chance that it could
happen again, live on television for all of us to see. In retrospect I wish they’d taken that chance.
I can’t remember the launch, but everyone knew that it was happening, and that it was
successful when it happened. And this more than anything was the thing that was most
impactful to me about the Challenger disaster, whether I knew it at the time or not. In the face
of tragedy, we went back. In this case, that future day didn’t belong to the brave because of
some cosmic order or natural law, because none such exists. It belonged to the brave in this case
because people chose to act with courage from the moment Challenger exploded until the
moment Discovery reached equilibrium with Earth’s gravity, far above our planet’s surface on
that September day in 1988.
4. 4
That lesson is one that I cannot clearly say I understood at the time, nor can I even begin
to speculate how it has affected me directly. What I hope is that I’ve embodied it somehow
during moments in my life when I had the choice to either turn toward or turn away from a
difficult and terrifying challenge. So much of why we do what we do is obscured and
inaccessible to our conscious mind. There are moments in my life where I haven't acted
courageously when the opportunity to make that same choice presented itself. I think, and I’d
like to believe, that more often than not, though, I have acted bravely when I’ve needed to do
so. Maybe there’s a million other reasons for that, and maybe none of those reasons have
anything to do with that single memory all those years ago. But part of me thinks there must be
a reason that moment is so burned into my psyche that it’s the only thing I remember from that
year with any clarity. That has to mean something.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of touring the National Air and Space Museum in
DC for the first time. One of the last exhibits I visited was titled “Moving Beyond Earth.” On a
two-story screen they were projecting in a loop, the launch of the Shuttle Atlantis on July 21,
2011 (“Moving Beyond Earth”). It was the final launch of the space shuttle era. Perhaps it was
the size of the screen and the setting, or maybe it was the tacit agreement that one takes up as a
spectator when visiting a museum, but it was curious that everywhere else throughout the
museum there was constant chatter, the dull hum of hushed conversations, footsteps, the
laughter of children—but not in this dark corner of the Smithsonian. The only noise in the room
was from the recording of the radio transmissions from the control tower and from the roar of
the solid rocket boosters firing Atlantis into space. No one in the room was talking, and there
was an absolute fixation on that screen. It was a powerful and emotional moment for me for
reasons I can’t articulate. Maybe that’s as it should be. For me there’s always been something so
large about space travel that it can’t be put into words. There’s just an immense feeling that it is
5. 5
so much bigger than all of us—not just as Americans, but as a species—bigger than all of
humanity and what we can collectively fathom. There’s acting out bravery in your own life, and
then there’s the thought that, somehow, that action, and the momentum that each act of courage
generates can somehow lead all of us to places that should be absolutely impossible for us to get
to. Maybe Gene Cernan, our most recent astronaut to step foot on the moon, said it best, “I
walked on the moon. What can’t you do?”
Works Cited:
Logsdon, John A. “Return to Flight: Richard H. Truly and the Recovery from the
Challenger Accident.” NASA. NASA History Series, n.d. Web. 14 Jan. 2017.
“Moving Beyond Earth.” National Air and Space Museum. N.p., 08 Sept. 2016. Web. 14
Jan. 2017.
Reagan, Ronald W. “Explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger Address to the Nation,
January 28, 1986.” NASA. NASA History Office, n.d. Web. 14 Jan. 2017.
