The Challenger space shuttle began to spew smoke and flames into the launch pad, then rise slowly off the ground. The class cheered at the flash of light, shot pictures of the pretty colors and saw a splitting trail of smoke.
"Where'd the shuttle go?" 8-year-old Sally Wuellenweber asked, loud enough to be recorded by a reporter broadcasting the sounds of the bleachers to the world.
"Oh God!" wailed Mary Wuellenweber, Sally's mother, again loud enough to be picked up by the microphone. "Oh dear God! It happened!"
That was ten years ago, on Jan. 28, 1986. The then third-graders are now college freshmen, and each has had to work toward a private reckoning with McAuliffe's death. As children, some became uneasy about flying. As young adults, some are extremely wary of any authority who offers assurances that all will go well.
In Florida that day, the third-graders went from elation, to frightened silence, to tears. Tour guides, school officials and parents began herding the class off the bleachers, into a NASA shuttle bus.
Students in the spotlight
Until the Challenger exploded, those third-graders were living a dream.
The previous July, NASA had selected McAuliffe, a much-loved social studies teacher at Concord High School, to bring the wonders of space exploration to the nation's children. McAuliffe maintained a grueling schedule of astronaut training and public appearances in the months leading up to the launch. So the third-graders -- her son, Scott, and 17 of his third-grade classmates at Kimball School -- stepped into the spotlight.
They appeared in newspapers and on television decked out like college athletes in free gear from Puma, Adidas, Speedo. Greyhound gave them free banks shaped like buses. McDonald's gave them silver "Young Astronaut" bags, and arranged a special appearance with Ronald McDonald.
In Florida, NASA officials gave the students special tours, let them try on space suits, showed them an IMAX film about space exploration. Many of the kids dreamed of becoming astronauts.
One night, they went out to the launch pad to see Challenger itself, lighted up and aimed into the dark sky. Only two things dampened the fun: launch delays and biting cold. All the NASA officials seemed so confident, with their safety equipment and thorough checks. The class grew antsy at the delays.
It was the third try that turned disastrous. And within minutes, school officials decided the entire class would return to Concord that night.
The adults on the NASA shuttle bus helped take the "Young Astronaut" T-shirts from the kids, now stunned. Shut off in a motel conference room, the Concord school superintendent learned definitively of McAuliffe's death through snippets of television news, but he kept the information to himself, figuring that kids should hear from their parents.
Many of the students had heard Mission Control's dire announcements while on the bleachers and assumed McAuliffe was dead. Others, including some parents, suspected the worst, hoped for something better. Having watched the Challenger explode, some of the children dreaded having to fly to reach home.
Massachusetts state troopers met the group when it landed in Boston. The troopers escorted the kids, parents and school officials into another bus to drive the final leg back to Concord.
The bus was heading out a back entrance at the airport when the driver suddenly hit the brakes. A car was stopped in the road, blocking the way.
As the state troopers approached the car with their flashlights, a dozen people jumped out of a nearby bus, just beyond the stopped car, and began taking pictures.
The scene in Concord was even worse.
Sally Wuellenweber buried her face in her mother's hip as they got off the bus together.
Reporters shouted, "How do you feel?"
It was a question she couldn't begin to answer.
The explosion's aftermath
Third grade at Kimball School resumed a couple days after the explosion, though without Scott McAuliffe. During the explosion, was with his father an sister, away from the bleachers. His classmates hadn't seen him since. The class sat around and talked.
Even if parents, friends and counselors would never fully understand the ordeal, the students understood each other. NASA, school officials, even the parents had seemed so sure the shuttle was safe. And where was the body? NASA wouldn't return a casket of McAuliffe's remains for months.
So Zuri McWhite figured McAuliffe was just stuck somewhere, waiting to parachute back to safety. She imagined how everyone would be so happy and relieved to see McAuliffe's triumphant return. She wanted to believe in the death but couldn't. She found a solution in her imagination: Rather than seeing McAuliffe parachuting to safety, she began seeing body parts floating in the ocean.
A grotesque image to most, it was peaceful, final to Zuri McWhite.
Sarah Carley was angry at NASA. Every day, she clipped newspaper articles about the disaster and filed them away in a clear plastic bag.
She wondered if McAuliffe and the crew had had time to know something had gone wrong, and figured they did. She also wondered about Scott McAuliffe's stuffed frog, a toy his mother brought with her to space.
And that became Ms. Carley's image of death. McAuliffe's body was somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, with Scott's frog in the spacesuit's pocket, at rest.
Dealing with memories
A decade later, the third graders-turned college students say they are not traumatized by the disaster. But they still feel it.
Distrust of NASA, the government and its official assurances stays with them. They speak knowingly of the preciousness of life, of thing beyond their control, of limits that even McAuliffe's incredible enthusiasm couldn't overcome.
"Fate," says Ms. McWhite, now 18 and a freshman at the University of Maryland, "is a lot stronger than our will."
For Sally Wuellenweber, McAuliffe's death remains half-understood, half-felt. She hopes to teach elementary education -- a dream inspired, in part, by McAuliffe.
She feels the memory deep in her knotted stomach whenever a plane she's in lifts off from the runway. But the sharpest memories come a couple times each year, when the sky turns a certain eerie blue. Then she can see the booster rockets and the thick, splintered smoke trials still hanging in the sky.
