CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – On Thursday, families of the astronauts who perished in the Challenger space shuttle disaster returned to the historic launch site to commemorate the somber event’s 40th anniversary.

The seven astronauts aboard Challenger tragically lost their lives when the shuttle disintegrated shortly after liftoff on January 28, 1986.

During a memorial ceremony at the Kennedy Space Center, Alison Smith Balch, daughter of Challenger pilot Michael Smith, emotionally reflected on how that fateful, cold morning altered her life and the lives of many others forever. “In that sense,” she expressed to the hundreds gathered in mourning, “we are all part of this story.”

“Every day I miss Mike,” his widow, Jane Smith-Holcott, added with heartfelt emotion. “Every day feels the same.”

The shuttle’s O-ring seals in its right solid rocket booster were compromised by the frigid temperatures, leading to a catastrophic failure 73 seconds after launch. A flawed NASA culture at the time was also a key factor in this tragedy and later, the Columbia disaster 17 years after.

Kelvin Manning, deputy director of Kennedy Space Center, emphasized the importance of learning from those painful experiences. With rockets launching almost daily and a new astronaut mission to the moon on the horizon, he stressed that these lessons demand our unwavering attention “now more than ever.”

Challenger’s crew included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who was selected from more than 100 teachers representing every state. Two of her fellow teacher-in-space contenders — both retired now — attended the memorial.

“We were so close together,” said Bob Veilleux, a retired astronomy high school teacher from New Hampshire, McAuliffe’s home state.

Bob Foerster, a sixth-grade math and science teacher from Indiana, who was among the 10 finalists, said he’s grateful that space education blossomed after the accident and that it didn’t just leave Challenger’s final crew as “martyrs.”

“It was a hard reality,” Foerster noted at the Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy’s visitor complex.

Twenty-five names are carved into the black mirror-finished granite: the Challenger seven, the seven who perished in the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003, the three killed in the Apollo 1 fire on Jan. 27, 1967, and all those lost in plane and other on-the-job accidents.

Relatives of the fallen Columbia and Apollo crews also attended NASA’s Day of Remembrance, held each year on the fourth Thursday of January. The space agency also held ceremonies at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery and Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

“You always wonder what they could have accomplished” had they lived longer, Lowell Grissom, brother of Apollo 1 commander Gus Grissom, said at Kennedy. “There was a lot of talent there.”

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