Neil Armstrong: A Life Of Flight - Plot & Excerpts
(NASA) TWENTY-THREEAN AMERICAN TRAGEDYFlorida’s rare, bone-chilling freeze stiffened and split tropical flora as fire and smoke rose from smudge pots in citrus groves. It brought the nation’s spaceport to a slow crawl in the predawn hours of January 28, 1986.For the first time anyone could remember frost appeared on windshields. Icy fog formed above canals and lagoons. The living shivered. The disbelieving recorded 27 degrees before sunrise with not a single tropical insect moving. Birds accustomed to warm ocean breezes huddled. The space shuttle Challenger stood bathed in dazzling floodlights, seeming to ignore it all. Its metal and glass and exotic alloys unfeeling as the great ship of science rose 34 stories above its concrete and steel launchpad. Night slipped away and sunrise brought the first touch of warmth.The space plane’s crew of seven appeared on the launchpad. Among them was Sharon Christa McAuliffe with a smile as wide as her New England roots. She had been selected from thousands of applicants to be the “First Citizen in Space.”But McAuliffe wasn’t going into orbit as a tested scientific or engineering member of the crew.
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