Quote Originally Posted by Aloha_Shooter View Post
Junior year in college, the instructor came into class and told us all the Challenger had exploded on launch. Had to finish classes the rest of the day before I could get back to the dorm to watch news. One of my roommates comes in right before dinner making "Space Shuttle Pinto" jokes -- closest to murder I ever got. To cap it all off, that night was my first ever meeting with the L5 Society (one of the predecessors for today's National Space Society) -- as you can imagine, a very morose meeting.
and, in actuality, it was virtually a Pinto replay, where the launch was made for publicity's sake at the expense of safety. e.g., it was a calculated roll of the dice, and the astronauts died because of it.