An Unanswered Question

At 11:39 a.m. on Tuesday, January 28, the world changed for millions of children. It was difficult for them--and for us--not to be shaken. In view of the world, seven Americans met sudden death.

At the moment of tragedy, or during newscasts over the next several days, we watched crowds cheer as the shuttle Challenger soared into space. Then we heard only silence as plumes of white smoke shot off in all directions from an orange-pink fireball. Haltingly, the voice of Mission Control spoke: "Obviously...a major malfunction...has occurred." For several moments there was nothing more to be said.

Jubilation turned slowly to horrified shock. The cheers of Concord, New Hampshire students, wearing party hats and waving noisemakers, froze and then melted into tears. Third graders, classmates of the teacher-astronaut's son, who had earlier unfurled a banner proclaiming "Go Christa" from their special grandstand seats at the Florida launch site, began to hug one another for comfort. "Daddy!" screamed one of pilot Michael Smith's children from the crowd, "I want you, Daddy. You always promised nothing would happen."

We knew more about Christa McAuliffe, the first "ordinary citizen" in space, the effervescent schoolteacher on "the ultimate field trip," than the others. Buried among stories about her were pieces of information about them: engineer Gregory Jarvis was an enthusiastic jogger; mission specialist Judith Resnik was a classical pianist; and physicist Ronald McNair, who played the saxophone, took his favorite instrument along on a previous flight into space.

We knew most about Christa McAuliffe because, to children all across the country, this woman who was going to give lessons on weightlessness from space was "my teacher." Her death was experienced by many people under the age of 16 as a very personal loss.

"I wish you were still alive," murmured a three-and-a-half-year-old at Sojourners during his restless sleep the night of the shuttle catastrophe. Earlier in the day, he had watched the television while his parents tried to help him come to grips with the tragedy, gently explaining that the people on board had died. "But not all of them," he whispered. "The teacher didn't die." Unable to understand, he wanted to believe it was "OK now" when a newscast flashed back to events earlier in the day and showed a videotape of the astronauts waving and walking toward the spacecraft.

I remembered how 23 years ago my 9-year-old heart had tried to comprehend its first awareness of national tragedy. Just as Christa McAuliffe's parents' beams of pride faded into displays of shock, Jackie Kennedy's smiles and waves in Dallas had become a scream and a mad scramble for help. As then, and times since, we saw this year the sequences of disaster flashed before our eyes again and again. We struggle to comprehend the horror of disaster unfolding before our eyes and pray that this will be the last time.

TWO DAYS BEFORE the shuttle explosion, a fire raged through a crowded basement apartment in a low-income neighborhood of Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from our community's home. Among the nine people killed in the blaze, Washington's worst fire in many years, were seven undocumented laborers from El Salvador. Having recently fled from their country's official terror, they found jobs for which they were underpaid and a home with friends who shared the small space for survival.

There was no heroes memorial for the dead named Chicas, Cruz, Salmeron, Ayala, Chirino, and Villatoro. The fire that engulfed them was not seen on national television. Their families were thousands of miles away. After the disaster an astute city official referred to severe overcrowding in their neighborhood and remarked, "This may be the first of many tragedies like this."

The day after the shuttle catastrophe, federal budget documents for fiscal year 1987 were released by the White House. The president's proposal calls for eliminating, cutting, or freezing at current levels almost all human needs programs while increasing defense spending by 40 percent and substantially boosting the space program. A week later Reagan opened his State of the Union Address, which had been delayed while the nation was in the grip of grief, by calling on us all to be ready to do what the "seven Challenger heroes...would want us to do--go forward, America, and reach for the stars."

Some of us are not ready. We live with a question that has yet to be answered: How can we send some to the stars, while others are still trapped in the basement?

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.