The kids and I have been cooped up in the house for the past two days. The return of school is looming over all three of us (as the summer is actually a break for the homeschooling mom), and I feel somewhat guilty for not planning lots of fun activities to wind up the summer with. On the other hand…it’s hot, I’m uncomfortably pregnant, and Kyle and I are forced to share the one car while the university shuttle is on a break for two weeks and our other car is stuck in some bizarre registration limbo due to it automatically failing emissions because no mechanic on earth can get the check engine light to turn off. So, lacking in worthwhile forms of entertainment, we decided to watch the shuttle launch.

Much to my chagrin, our cable provider does not carry NASA TV, so we were forced to watch the feed through the NASA website. Thanks to CNN Headline News, we discovered that this feed is not quite live, and lags behind by 10 seconds or so. But the alternative was watching 10 minutes of CNN trying too hard to link this mission with the Challenger tragedy (From what I caught out of the corner of my eye, it went something like this: “Barbara Morgan trained with Christa McAuliffe! Who died! When the Challenger exploded!” <insert footage of disaster here>), followed by 30 seconds of actual launch footage drowned out by the yappy anchor, followed by a story about about a convenience store clerk who threatened a robber with his own gun. So NASA TV web feed it was.

I actually used to watch NASA TV when I was a kid. Not only the launches- the boring stuff in between, with the little map tracking the shuttle and dry, technical communications exchanges. I also fantasized about going to Space Camp, like this local kid that collected enough soda cans to pay for his trip. And one of my most beloved books was The Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual, complete with fold-out reproduction of the shuttle instrument panel to facilitate pretend shuttle missions.

I recently unearthed a stack of Challenger-related newspaper articles that I saved at the tender age of seven. That was the first shuttle launch that I ever watched, thanks to a snow day spent at my dad’s house. I had two cheapo Christa McAuliffe posters from the NEA and a model of the Challenger…I found the whole thing to be quite exciting. I remember being very confused when the explosion happened (Does solid rocket booster separation make so much smoke?), completely traumatized when I figured out what had happened, and then became obsessed with the whole thing for an extended period of time. I acquired more posters, more articles, and checked out a massive adult non-fiction book about the tragedy from the local library a year or two later.

I was a weird child. And I never made it to Space Camp.