For 73 seconds, a crowd of excited Americans looked to the sky in wonder and awe as they waved goodbye to the crew aboard NASA’s Challenger Space Shuttle in Cape Canaveral, Fla. For 73 seconds, the skies were the limit.
The explosion that followed rocked the nation, and 40 years later, won’t soon be forgotten by those who remember.
Judith Resnik, an Akron native who became the first Jewish woman in space and the second woman in space as an engineer and pilot for NASA, was remembered as a “trailblazer” ahead of the 40th anniversary of her death aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle on Jan. 28, 1986…