ABSTRACT
The Challenger disaster earned with it some special ironies that heightened its sorrowful impact. The crew on this shuttle mission had seemed a demographic microcosm of US people: two women— one of them Jewish— a black man, a man with an Oriental surname, even a man named Smith. Every person in the United States had a special symbol for whom to mourn. Television coverage of the launch allowed millions to witness the disaster even before the NASA mission controllers in Houston saw it on their monitoring instruments. Through the immediacy of live-television technology viewers were forced to acknowledge the risks of space technology— risks forgotten or hidden beneath the nationalistic pride of seeing astronauts walking on the moon and returning safely to earth. In the aftermath of Challenger, political leaders and policy makers will have to make many difficult decisions concerning the future of the US space program.
