Upon receiving her Ph.D. four months later, Mack instead left Harvard to take a teaching position at MIT.

Two years later, when the shuttle program was revived, Mack was finally able to pursue her dream. She applied to the shuttle program, making it to the semifinalist round of interviews.

Roush also changed his career path in response to the Challenger disaster.

As a dual concentrator in physics and astronomy who had been “fantasizing about being an astronaut,” Roush says he became disillusioned with his studies after the disaster.

He began to critically analyze the risks of the space program and what he saw as the “bureaucracy” of NASA, which he and others thought may have failed to prevent the explosion.

“I had a pretty romantic notion before going to college,” he says. “Seeing how so much can ride on a program like the space shuttle helped to open my eyes.”

Roush changed his concentration to history and science and later wrote his Ph.D. thesis on technological disasters. He now works as a technology journalist.

Even students who did not change their career plans say that the disaster forever changed the spirit of their generation.

For undergraduates at the College, most of whom were not even born at the time of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster was their first experience of a national tragedy.

“We were a sheltered generation in terms of American history,” Velazquez says.

The disaster also awakened students to the dangers of the shuttle program, which, in the years preceding the tragedy, had been envisioned as a future form of commercial transportation.

Christa McAuliffe, who boarded the Challenger as the first schoolteacher hoping to travel to space, represented the beginning of the fulfillment of that promise.

“It was practically like riding a bus,” recalls Paul F. Vittimberga ’86 of the pre-Challenger notion of shuttle flight. “[The disaster] kind of pulled back on the dream of the shuttle. It wasn’t exactly a bus ride to space,” he says.

“There was a sense that the space program would never be the same,” Yoo adds.

RESEARCH REVERSED