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AFK Post February 2026



Tags: prosetvhistoryseriesmemory

Random collection of media:


Charts seem particularly challenging to make coherent, which is making /r/DataIsUgly more AI-cluttered and nonsensical by the day:

Of 20th-century alleged "misconceptions" two things which stick out as extremely controversial are:

CNN and NASA were the only sources showing the launch live, so discourse usually starts on whether classes could watch, whether they tuned into the launch live after multiple delays, or if the memories come from replays and news reports on schools that watched the launch (for example McAuliffe's school in New Hampshire). A CNN article from 2016 supports the narrative:

If you were an American kid in 1986, you probably remember exactly where you were: That's because so many classrooms were watching the shuttle launch live via a special NASA satellite feed

But also emphasizes CNN's obscurity at the time:

…the Challenger disaster came as the young cable channel struggled to figure out its mission
[...]
'After this coverage, I rarely had to explain to people what CNN was'

Yet you see a peculiar number of stories where people remember watching live while home sick. An Instagram post claims during 4th grade, they went home alone to eat lunch, watched the shuttle explode on TV, and then walked back to school.

I did some searches on Google's News Archive and Google Scholar. Articles at the time agreed it "may have been the most horrifying live television since Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald". In a Boca Raton newspaper article there are accounts of students watching live, but it's memorialized with photos of a classroom watching a replay. One class near the space center is said to have looked out the window and then turned back to the TV when the launch plume wasn't visible.

A few days after the launch, 31–48% of school-aged children reported watching the launch in school:


As someone who had heard a lot of "debunking", this seems like a more reasonable middle ground. But most articles -including this survey- didn't make any comment on live versus replayed video. Children might not know or understand that they were watching a recording. The poll shows that >60% did have some discussion at school.
Memory could be compressing how people first learned of the Challenger - an immediate survey of college students found that 20% learned about it from TV, but two years later, twice as many of the same respondents said it was from a TV report.
I wondered if some of this might be affected by depictions in fiction. But Wikipedia lists only more recent shows from the 2020s. In an episode of Mixed-ish, partly informed by Christina Anthony's school story, group of students are depicted watching live in a cafeteria, but also adults gathered at work at an office and an airline.

One article interviewed multiple teachers who had applied for the teacher program or expected to take part in McAuliffe's lessons from the shuttle. Two teachers turned on the TV afterward, one going to a TV in the school library. A superintendent at another school describes a group of 250 students watching (enrollment at their high school today and 10 years ago was a bit over 400, so this was likely the majority of students, but not every student).

It's maybe possible that this reveals a wealth gap between schools with and without TV in the 80s, and the Gen X adults with spare time for posting online today could be from the TV schools?
On 9/11 I did not see any TV until I got home, but a social studies teacher summarized what was going on around midday. We had TV carts and not wall-mounted TVs. I heard about one teacher using a portable antenna TV to get updates when the internet was not functioning. I'm open to millennials' memories of their teachers tuning in during the day, particularly older kids or schools in the NYC area, but the idea that fifteen years earlier every classroom in my town was watching NASA TV feels unrealistic to me.

All this indicates it's a real experience for some Gen X kids, a traumatic memory (even if confused) for most, but also it remains oddly difficult to pin down considering its place in the American experience.