 Look at that 16 year old listening to her ipod on the subway. She’s a techno-gal; a product of the late 20th century; a true millennial. Now think of this. She was just born when the space ship Challenger blew up and all seven of its crew were killed. Who will call this to mind for her? What will help her remember?
There are books, of course, and movies and history teachers. But there are monuments, too- memorials. (You KNEW that was coming!)
I’ve been searching around this gloomy afternoon for memorials to the astronauts and their ill-fated ship. And in a few hours, I was able to locate parks and schools and living memorial student programs and many, many monuments.
There’s one in Israel at Rabin Park.
And there’s one on 14,080 ft high Challenger Point in the Kit Carson Mountain Range in Colorado. The small plaque was placed by Alan Silverstein and his supporters after the peak was renamed for the disaster in 1987. It’s bronze, simple, and says only “CHALLENGER POINT, 14080+' In Memory of the Crew of Shuttle Challenger Seven who died accepting the risk, expanding Mankind's horizons January 28, 1986 Ad Astra Per Aspera”. You’ll never find the marker, though, unless you climb the peak. (In an interesting aside, when the crew moved rocks to affix the plaque to a peak boulder, they found cremains of a man who had died in 1949 and had his ashes strewn to the high Rocky winds.)
On the other end of the spectrum, Miami Bayfront Park in FL has the last monument designed by famous Japanese-American Isamu Naguchi. It’s a white double helix that’s also meant to call to mind the twisting contrails of the Challenger as she plunged to earth. Set in a busy, fertile park in that blue city, it’s highly visible to everyone, but doesn’t have the meditative component.
In spite of the fact that the US Congress voted down authorization to raise a monument on public land to the crew, citing time limit laws, there’s a memorial in Arlington Cemetery with the faces of all of the astronauts and an appropriate inscription to them all. Underneath it lies remains of some of them. They’re the unidentified parts after the others were given to the appropriate families.
But there are memorials to the individual astronauts, too. The Christa McAuliffe Memorial in her hometown of Charlestown, W VA was paid for by the 1 million pennies that schoolchildren donated to the cause. Some of those pennies were melted down and included in the bronzework on the piece. And in LA, the Monument to Ellison Onizuka was raised by the Japanese people there to honor him (though he was actually born in Hawaii). It includes a 1/10 scale model of the Challenger. And Ronald McNair has a red sandstone monument in Brooklyn.
(Photo from the bayfrontpark.com website)
5:01:05 PM 
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