A quarter-century later, it still hurts...and it still inspires

Today is one of several yearly anniversaries which those in the space-exploration business like to call "Dead Astronauts Week."  But this one has hit a special milestone this year: twenty-five years ago this morning, at 11:38 AM Eastern Standard, we lost the first of what would be two of NASA's five active Space Shuttle Orbiters (Enterprise, you may recall, was a non-flying prototype) destroyed entire, with all hands aboard killed.

Challenger's loss hurt all the more because, for the first time in the history of the US space program, someone not a military servicemember or scientist had been aboard: a beautiful young schoolteacher who was supposed to give her students at Concord High School in Concord, NH a very special science lesson from orbit. Instead, she and her fellow crew members ended up giving them—and everyone else on Earth, Your Humble Correspondent most certainly included—a far more powerful lesson.

That very evening, I wrote the following song. It was one of my earliest original songs that could be considered "filk," and may even be the first; memory is fuzzier with each passing year. Somehow it seems that for this year's observance, something special is called for. So....
( "Flying Free (Challenger's and Columbia's Song)" )