Man Insists Gen X Did Not Actually Watch The Challenger Explode & The Entire Generation Is 'Faking Victimhood' To 'Mock People's Trauma'
Uhh… yes we did? Why lie about this?
NASA Human Space Flight Gallery | Wikimedia Commons Every generation has their tragic touchstones. The Boomers had the JFK assassination, Millennials had 9/11. And the Iraq War. And the Great Recession. And political turmoil. And the way things are going so far for Gen Z? Well, we won't even get into that one.
But for Gen X, one event stands above the rest: The 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, which many witnessed live on television as mere schoolchildren. That is, if any of that even actually happened.
A man insists that Gen X did not actually watch the Challenger explode.
Ask basically any Gen Xer, and even some of the oldest Millennials, the first tragedy they remember, and they'll tell you the Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986. It's the cohort's main "where were you when?" event, and most of us remember it vividly, especially those of us on the younger end of the generation (like me). And that's for one simple reason: It traumatized the living crap out of us.
But according to a Bluesky user, who has since deleted their account, this is all made-up malarkey fabricated by a bunch of 80s-raised drama queens.
"That stupid 'Gen X watched the shuttle explode in school' thing is going around again, and no, that's not a thing that happened," the poster wrote. "Schools did not stop the day to force students to watch a live broadcast channel that was only available via satellite." The problem is, they did, and boy, did blowback ensue.
The poster said Gen X uses the Challenger to 'fake victimhood' and 'mock people's trauma.'
The launch of the Challenger was, in fact, a big deal because aside from the fact that space travel just wasn't as common or advanced then as it is now, it was also the first space mission to include a schoolteacher among its crew.
A nationwide contest of sorts called the Teacher In Space Project was held by NASA and received more than 11,000 applications. New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe was selected to travel on the mission, which was to launch a satellite and study Halley's Comet.
Given McAuliffe's involvement, the launch of the Challenger was a nationwide event in schools, and TVs were wheeled into classrooms all over the country (though not my own, for the record) to watch the launch. That "only available by satellite" claim by this Bluesky user is a total misunderstanding of the basic rudiments of TV: Carrying a satellite feed of a space shuttle launch is no more complicated than airing a baseball game or the Oscars. Every channel was carrying the Challenger that day.
It was an exciting moment for students and teachers alike because it bridged a sort of psychological gap in everyone: Space travel was no longer some untouchable concept only for mathematical geniuses. It was for regular people like teachers, too. For us schoolkids, that made it seem like it could also be for us — all we had to do was grow up, and we could go to space too.
It all felt mind-bogglingly close. I remember thinking, what if it had been Mrs. Morett, my first-grade teacher, who got to go up into space? Would she bring back a jar of space dust like when she brought us volcanic sand from Hawaii after Christmas break? It made it seem like the cosmos itself was just barely out of reach.
Imagine, then, the horror when everyone gathered with anticipation to watch this monumental achievement, and just moments after lift-off, the shuttle exploded on live television. Then imagine being just a child watching it. And then imagine that, rather than taking time to comfort and explain to you what just happened, the adults in the room simply went blank, and numb, and rolled the TV out of the room and told you to get back to your schoolwork.
That's what happened to most of us because it was a different time, when mental health and child development were not understood in the way they are today. Our teachers, nearly all of whom were Boomers or from the Silent Generation of people who'd had to survive the horrors of World War II and the Great Depression, did what they'd learned to do: They simply soldiered on and told us to do the same.
My class wasn't among those who watched it live — perhaps Mrs. Morett had a premonition or something. But I do vividly recall her and the teacher across the hall, Mrs. McKenna, running out of their classrooms when the news came over the PA system and collapsing into each other's arms, sobbing. You could tell a teacher dying this way felt entirely too close to home. For me, and I'm sure many of my classmates, I'd never seen an adult break down like that; I didn't know adults were even capable of it. It scared me more than the explosion itself ever could. And then, just like every Gen X'er says: It was basically never spoken of again.
People online were perplexed and angered by the poster's weird claim.
It's hard to know why someone would post something so openly and verifiably fallacious, but there's a certain kind of person who will do anything for clout these days. Regardless, accusing an entire generation of "faking victimhood to mock people's trauma" is a pretty ugly charge, and pretty much no one took kindly to it.
On Reddit, several threads cropped up among Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who still viscerally remembered the event. "We watched it in class because my teacher applied to be on the flight," one wrote. "She communicated the honor and excitement of having a civilian teacher on the space shuttle."
Another who grew up in Houston recalled watching it live, when a boy in his class "started weeping hard." The kid had never told anyone because he was afraid his classmates would think he was bragging, but his dad was an astronaut. He'd just watch him blow up on television.
It's disorienting to see how we seem to have collectively arrived at a place where the internet has so eroded many people's empathy that anything even remotely earnest, even remembering a historical event, is now distasteful and cringe. Eventually, there will probably be a younger generation who says stuff like this about 9/11 for clout, too.
It will always be an incredibly strange and dehumanizing instinct. Collective memory and storytelling are literally what make us human, and it's part of how we hopefully prevent history from repeating itself while honoring those who've been lost along the way.
Rolling your eyes at it doesn't make you more sophisticated than the rest of us. It just detaches you further from your own humanity. I think you'll find in the end that the clicks, no matter how tantalizing, aren't worth it.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
