Ironic that they launched when it was outside the safety design specs. The cost for the one day delay was $3,000,000 and NASA had lots of press and VIP's they didn't want to let down.....
Walking past the elementary school office. They had big windows across the front of it. There was a TV on a rolling cart visable and several of us students stopped to watch. I was in 3rd or 4th grade.
It's a family forum so I can't really say....But an hour later my then girlfriend and I went out to get something to eat and noticed everyone had there headlights on....Turned on the radio and heard what had happened....
I was in 8th grade. Since there was going to be the first teacher going into space, they had a tv set up for us to watch the launch. Definitely won't forget it
Sophomore in high school, walking down the hall- a class was watching the launch, I heard a ruckus, yelling, a lot of "OH NO!"...so I ran into the room to see what was going on.
Don't really remember what I was doing when the Challenger blew up but I had the opportunity to watch the Columbia take off on it's final flight. It was impressive even from 140 miles away! I was attending some vendor training in Sarasota and they took the class out to the parking lot at launch time and pointed in the appropriate direction and told us to just watch for a minute or two. Shortly after that a HUGE smoke plume appeared in the distance so we watched it until it abruptly stopped. My first thought was that it had exploded like the Challenger but that was just the point where it had reached a high enough altitude to turn away from us so it didn't appear to be climbing any more.
Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. Our unit was in a dayroom in one of the old WW II wooden barracks, watching TV, awaiting transportation to take us to Volk Field to fly back to Fort Campbell. TV was on in the dayroom, we were watching the launch.