Reagan's Challenger Address

At 11:39 on the morning of January 28, 1986, seventy-three seconds after launch, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic. All seven crew members were killed, among them Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire social studies teacher chosen to be the first teacher in space. Because of her, schoolchildren across the country had been watching the launch live in their classrooms.

Ronald Reagan was to deliver the State of the Union address that evening. He postponed it, the first time a president had done so, and instead spoke to the nation from the Oval Office for about four minutes. The speech was written in a matter of hours by Peggy Noonan. Reagan named each of the seven astronauts and acknowledged that the country was still learning to accept that the shuttle program was dangerous.

He spoke directly to the children who had watched. "I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery," he said. "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted, it belongs to the brave." He promised that the program would continue and noted that on that day, 390 years earlier, the explorer Sir Francis Drake had died aboard ship off the coast of Panama.

He closed with lines from High Flight, a sonnet by John Gillespie Magee Jr., a young American pilot killed in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941. "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." The investigation that followed found that NASA had launched despite engineers' warnings about the shuttle's O-ring seals in cold weather, and the address remains a model of presidential consolation.