24 years ago yesterday, I was almost 16 years old and a Sophomore in high school in a small town in Central Illinois.  But when I heard about the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion  I was actually inside the grade school up the street where some of my friends and I occasionally went to eat lunch.  We were walking down the hallway when someone came up to us and said “Did you hear that the Shuttle blew up?”.  This was a kid who had gone home for lunch and had just come back to school for the afternoon.  I didn’t believe it at first … thought he was trying to pull a prank or tell a bad joke or something.

We didn’t have any TVs in school way back then and the Internet and cell phones didn’t even exist, so it was all by word of mouth.  If kids didn’t go home during lunch period to eat, most of the rest of us might not have even heard the news till we all got home from school that afternoon.  I remember watching it over and over and over on the TV after school.  They played the explosion about a million times.  The newscasters were all studying the video to see if they could see the Shuttle orbiter or at least the crew cabin falling from the cloud. I wasn’t sad at the time I was watching it because I had this hope that the crew had somehow survived or gotten blown clear of that horrible looking explosion.

A couple years later, when I was a senior, I painted a 2 story tall mural inside my high school dedicated to the Challenger crew:  http://www.leucht.com/blog/2007/02/space-shuttle-challenger-mural-at-my-high-school/

A couple years later when I was in college, I got a co-op job with NASA. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Kurt Leucht

P.S. Feel free to leave your own answer to the question “Where were you…” below in the comments or directly in the Facebook comments if that’s where you found this article.

(Not me … Mark Wahlberg in the film Rock Star)

In case you want to witness this spectacle for yourself, I put some snippets of it on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ufa2s215dQ

Or you can just watch the YouTube snippets right here by clicking the play button below:

Since this performance, I’ve had lots of people come up to me and tell me that they didn’t know I could sing like that. I just tell them that I sing like this all the time along with the radio in my car, so it’s really not a big deal. I guess I’ve just never sung like this in public until now.

Thanks for all the kind words. I’m just using the gifts that God gave me, though.

The World Famous Acme Catapult team has been invited to be the first American competitor at the European Championship Punkin Chuckin contest in Belgium for next year, 2010. This is an exciting opportunity to take the American brand of punkin chuckin global! But they can only do this with lots and lots of help from people like me and you.

Full Disclosure:  The Acme Catapult team is comprised of Bob Kruse who is my stepdad, and a few of his closest friends and coworkers.

This is a huge undertaking and the round trip overseas shipping costs, airfare, lodging, and food expenses will add up very quickly.  They are in need of monetary donations and they’ve made it very simple to donate online via PayPal.  Just go to the Acme Catapult website (http://www.acmecatapult.com/) and click on the PayPal Donate button!

The Ares I is intended to replace the Space Shuttle for launching astronauts into space after it retires in the next year or so.  Today’s launch, dubbed the I-X mission, was an unmanned flight test of this new rocket.  Not only was it unmanned, but the whole upper stage was fake and just dropped into the ocean after separation.  But we’re taking baby steps here, people.  Don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. 

Here’s the video that I took.  Click on this link to see this video on the YouTube website where you can comment and vote on it and stuff.

And here are some photos.  Click on any photo for a full sized version.

Obligatory photo of the countdown clock with the launch vehicle in the background.  It was 5am when I arrived at the Press Site this morning.  Way way earlier than my normal arrival time.

Inside the NASA Press Site where they show various camera views of the launch vehicle and they also have some cool large models of the Ares I and also the future Ares V heavy lift cargo vehicle.  These models are like 7 or 8 feet tall.

Various news channels shoot interviews all day long here at the NASA Press Site.  Here you can see the Air Force weather officer getting some time on camera with Fox 35.

NASA TV showed some beautiful sunrise video …

… so I went outside to see it for myself.

Live trucks lined up in the NASA Press Site parking lot. You can see the rocket in amongst the transmission towers.

The NASA Press Site is about 3.5 miles from the launch pad.  You can see the white rocket and the three really tall lightning towers around the launch pad.  These towers were built especially for the Ares I program.

Here are the folks from NASA Edge recording their show.  NASA Edge is a cool and hip educational program on NASA TV. You should check it out. While you’re there, be sure to also check out NASA-360, which is another cool educational program that NASA produces.

This is the employee signature banner for Ares I-X.  Each flight gets a banner that is displayed along with the vehicle and these banners are signed by KSC employees who have worked on that mission.  I worked on the ground control system for the Ares I-X mission, so I made sure I signed this banner.  I wonder if you can find my signature…

Can you find my signature now?

How about now?

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The Ares I-X rocket doesn’t look terribly huge inside the massive Vehicle Assembly Building, but it’s nearly as tall as the Saturn V rockets that we used to go to the moon during the Apollo program.

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Excitement is in the air as the new big rocket emerges from the VAB.

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Isn’t she big and beautiful!

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Not symmetrical by design.  We’re re-using a Shuttle mobile launcher platform for this flight, which has two holes for solid rocket booster exhaust.  So we mounted the Ares I-X rocket over one of the two SRB holes in the platform.

Glowing in the spotlights.

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The spotlights were very bat-symbol-like.  I didn’t get a good photo of it, but there was enough moisture in the air to clearly see the rocket’s silouette projected big and bold up into the sky.  It was quite impressive.

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Obligatory photo of me standing in front of the rocket for the scrapbook.

Here is the video:

Or you can watch the video directly on YouTube here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHEla1t0byQ