Why the Challenger disaster haunts the collective memory

The big picture: It's not enough to say NASA was admired; it was the stuff of dreams.

• Boomers who watched the Moon landing on TV taught their kids that astronauts were heroes. We devoured "The Right Stuff." We beat the Soviets.
• Also: Space.

Zoom in: The shuttle's 25th launch received especially aggressive promotion as an educational mission.

• NASA provided astronaut training to Christa McAullife, a high school social studies teacher from New Hampshire, who joined the crew as the first "Teacher In Space" — a new program to inspire kids to study science and math.

Between the lines: That meant schools across the country rolled out TVs for millions of kids to tune in live that morning.

The bottom line: The stuff of dreams became the stuff of nightmares.

Schoolteachers and principals were left to offer impromptu therapy in an age before districts had phone lists of counselors at the ready for traumatic events.

• Then the explosion aired in a near-constant loop on TV.

Erin's thought bubble: I was in 1st grade and saw the footage that night with my parents, whose urgency had braced me for a Death Star-level inferno.

• My first reaction was to say I thought the explosion would be bigger — which, of course, led to aghast lectures about the sanctity of human life.

• Feeling terrible, I retreated to my room and wrote a poem about the horror of the day to make up for my callousness. It was the first time I can remember learning about sensitivity around death and suffering.
• Meanwhile, my dad recalls my 3-year-old brother for weeks afterward, asking whenever his attention was called to something on TV: "Is it going to blow up?"

Flash forward: Seven people dying in a faraway fire may seem a small terror to those whose indelible childhood news images include live human bodies plunging from the World Trade Center. Or who view up-close footage of deadly shootings circulating online.

• Yes, but: At the time, it was the worst thing we'd seen.