Twenty-five years ago Friday, the space shuttle Challenger vanished from the blue Florida sky, leaving only white corkscrews of smoke hanging in the air.
Challenger's disintegration 73 seconds after liftoff took the lives of high-school teacher Christa McAuliffe and six fellow astronauts, who perished in front of their families, friends and schoolchildren watching at Cape Canaveral and on live television across the nation.
Afterward, President Reagan told a shocked and grieving nation that the legacy of the accident would not be curtailed ambition for the space program, but accomplishments that would have made Challenger's crew proud.
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