On my 12th birthday, I watched the Challenger explosion happen right in front of my eyes. Me and the rest of the kids from Indian Harbour Beach watched the pieces of the shuttle slowly fall out of the sky. Some speculated that one of the pieces was an escape pod, but one of the kids whose dad worked on the shuttle said there wasn't an escape pod. We just couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible that with all that focused attention on getting those 7 astronauts safely into space that such a thing could happen.
It was not the best experience for a kid who loved space and science.
However, it didn't turn me off from it, far from it. I ended up going to college for Aeronautical Engineering, before switching to Physics. I ended up as a nuclear physicist and doing a nuclear fusion startup. I still live within sight of the VAB.
If you want your kids to be interested in science, its more important that they be exposed to rockets, science, etc. than that they see it always be successful. Just showing them that it's cool goes a long way. But its much easier if you don't have to mix in questions about life and death, especially at such young ages.
Did you know that the shuttle was mostly intact after the disintegration [1]?
"The crew cabin, made of reinforced aluminum, was a particularly robust section of the shuttle. During vehicle breakup, it detached in one piece and slowly tumbled into a ballistic arc. NASA estimated the load factor at separation to be between 12 and 20 g; within two seconds it had already dropped to below 4 g and within ten seconds the cabin was in free fall. The forces involved at this stage were likely insufficient to cause major injury."
An important lesson for the kids is that cutting edge technology is hard. Rocket science is hard. Like a 10% chance of explosions in an unmanned flight and a 2% chance of explosion in a manned flight chance hard.
(Protip: Only put the humans in the safer rockets, and be sure that they are going to so something useful up there, and anyway explain them that this is dangerous.)
Probably in 20, 50 or 100 years this will be as safe as current planes, but today it's a dangerous task.
I always find this opinion infuriating. It's a liquid fueled rocket, we've had those for 50 years, so it's not cutting edge! It's like saying a modern Formula-1 car isn't cutting edge because we had the Lotus 77 40 years ago that looked a hell of a lot like it.
You have no idea what parts of it are or are not cutting edge. I guarantee you many of the parts and pieces in the rocket required pushing boundaries. All the little bits of material science, modern computational analysis, and advanced manufacturing techniques are cutting edge.
Eh, developed by/for the Air Force, e.g. the mid-50s Jupiter used RP-1/LOX. For that matter, Mercury and Gemini used Army and Air Force rockets for boosters, it wasn't until Apollo that they used purpose built civilian rockets. The gas-generator design of the rocket engines goes back at least to the mid-50s in the USSR, not sure when it was first used in the US, but various Saturn rockets developed for Apollo used that design.
They're using cutting edge stuff here and there, e.g. friction stir welding, which is a good match for the long seams in boosters, but mostly its organizational, and clean slate, not starting with a military rocket which is developed for and under different constraints. Or explicitly (Apollo) or implicitly (Space Shuttle and beyond) as a public works project, where cost is secondary to employing a lot of people.
Yup, my two kids here watched with me. Afterwards we talked about how difficult it is to do some things in life, and how we should keep trying even when things don't go our way.
Facepalm.
In the last few minutes, over a dozen K-Nex rockets have lifted off and exploded shortly after takeoff.
Sigh.
Not the best introduction to the second Space Age for them.... ah well, we'll try again later.
At least nobody was aboard.