an alternative history of the Challenger explosion

CN CSA

Last week, I told my counselor I wrote (but never submitted) an alternative history of the Challenger explosion. If you know my work, you know that Challenger was a private as well as public trauma for me:

Twenty-seven years ago, while everyone else was hopelessly gazing at debris raining down like shooting stars, I was hypnotized by those sibling booster rockets snapping apart: a DNA double-helix blown wide open, fragments of the orbiter like nucleotides spilling into dead space, never to recombine. Nobody sees what we see. It was exactly how my brother warned it would be if anyone found out about us.

“There are conspiracy theorists,” I said, “who believe the astronauts are alive.” Crisis actors, mission specialists in the indoctrination of American youth through what US News & World Report called “the first ever national tragedy on children.”

One piece of “evidence”: President Ronald Reagan’s address to the nation:

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. 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. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

“These conspiracy nuts scour the web for doppelgangers of Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Michael Smith, Dick Scobee — all of them — and claim it is them.” The doppelgangers do not even use assumed identities; they go by the same names.

Nothing sways people who refuse to believe everyone died onboard the orbiter. Not archival news footage. Not the Rogers Commission.

If you tell them the doppelganger for Ronald McNair is actually his little brother Carl, they will counter that nobody can prove Carl exists as his own person — never mind the gap between his two front teeth that Ronald did not have, or his career. Or his grief.

Same for astronaut Carl Onizuka and his brother Claude.

Christa McAuliffe looks nothing like her “doppelganger,” law professor Sharon A. McAuliffe, who only “matched” because of her last name.

Gregory Jarvis? Someone has yet to find him out there, living his best life.

The fantasy obliterates the trauma.

NASA Public Affairs Officer Steve Nesbitt — the voice behind Flight controllers here looking carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. — attempted to do the same:

He didn’t only want to erase it; he wanted to overwrite it. He wanted to implant his own false memory—confusing Discovery and Challenger so he did not have to carry that pain.

“I have read a lot about false memories,” I told my counselor.

I showed them a 2009 paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology entitled False Memories: What the Hell are they For? by Eryn J. Newman and Stephen Lindsay, who wrote that “recalling past and imagining future events recruited similar neurological regions—this neurological overlap was especially apparent when participants elaborated, adding details to their constructions.”

There is no fundamental difference between imagination and memory; the future and the past.

Without “memory flexibility, to produce illusory episodes,” argue Newman and Linsday, “our ability to imagine new events and reconsider the past would be less flexible and rather limited.”

In other words: What if false memories are not major malfunctions, but rather, as Felipe de Brigard wrote in 2014 in Synthese, “the normal result of a larger cognitive system that performs a different function, and for which remembering is just one operation?”

Memory is not a tape recorder. It is not passive. It is a tool we can use—and while false memories can sometimes be terrifying, like when cops talk an innocent person into believing they committed a crime, or conspiracy theories that gaslight and deny reality — they can also be healing.

“I can’t change my future,” I told my counselor, “without changing my past.”

(audio of my brother’s taped police phone call, in which he confesses and breaks down and apologizes, jumbled with Steve Nesbitt announcing Discovery’s launch)