(WWJ) – Saturday marked 37 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion rocked the world.
Just 73 seconds after liftoff, the NASA spacecraft broke apart, killing astronauts Gregory Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Christa McAuliffe, Michael J. Smith, Judith Resnik, Robert Overmeyer, Ellison Onizuka and Dick Scobee.
Mike Murray of the Delta College Planetarium in Bay City was running the planetarium in Orlando, Florida at the time of the tragedy and saw it happen. He tells WWJ’s Erin Vee on a new edition of “All Over the Space” he quickly got involved to make sure the astronauts who were killed would be memorialized.
“I was on the steering committee for what’s now called the Astronaut’s Memorial Foundation, which built the big reflective memorial at the Kennedy Space Center,” he said. “It was a reminder that space flight is still a very dangerous and risky undertaking, and it still is today.”
“What we wanted the memorial to do and for the foundation to do is to make sure that it’s not enough to just simply memorialize and recognize the contributions and sacrifice that these astronauts made, but to make sure that we’re reminded that there were lessons to be learned and we should always heed those lessons and use them as we move into the future of exploration,” he said.
Nearly four decades later, Murray says for a lot of the families and towns with ties to those killed in the explosion, they are “very well known.”
“There’s a lot of schools and foundations that are still named after the astronauts,” he said, noting the Challenger Learning Centers – which K-12 STEM education experiences that combine simulation and hands-on activities – are a big part of the legacy.
“The first one was actually opened in Michigan just a couple years ago. Those are ways of continuing the process of educating and learning and continuing with discovery,” Murray said.
More information on the Delta College Planetarium in Bay City can be found online. Follow the planetarium on Facebook and Instagram for the latest news and updates.
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