January 28 · This Day in America
It is a cold Florida morning, and millions of schoolchildren are watching, because one of the seven aboard is a teacher. Christa McAuliffe was going to teach a lesson from orbit. At 11:38 a.m. the Space Shuttle Challenger climbs off the pad on a column of fire. Seventy-three seconds later, 46,000 feet over the Atlantic, it breaks apart in a fork of white smoke. Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe — all of them gone, in front of the whole country. The cause was an O-ring, a rubber seal made brittle by the cold, a flaw engineers had feared the night before. America does not stop reaching for space. It grounds the fleet for nearly three years, it tells the truth about what failed, and it goes back. But it never again forgets that the sky is paid for. "We will never forget them," the president says that night, "as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1915
Congress merges the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life-Saving Service into a single armed force: the United States Coast Guard. One half had chased smugglers and enforced the young republic's tariffs since 1790; the other had run into the surf after drowning sailors. Together they became the service whose motto is Semper Paratus — Always Ready — and whose first duty, before any war, is simply to save the life in the water.
Source: www.history.uscg.mil
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”President Ronald Reagan, 1986