N905 —

I worked over on the other side of the flightline ("Security Hill"), but drove down to the transient ramp to shoot this photo of the Challenger making a halfway stop at Kelly (San Antonio) on its way back to Cape Kennedy, having landed at Edwards AFB, California, following a 'routine' shuttle mission, sometime around 1984/1985. From Kelly, I transferred to Scotland in 1985, and was on Ops Officer duty at a USAF Space Operations ground station the morning we lost the Challenger. My ground station was always the first site to verify telemetry from every shuttle launch. That morning, we watched our computers drive the attenas to the exact horizon bearing to pick up Challenger as it should have appeared. Watched and waited, that is, until informed to "Stand down... Challenger is lost."