If you read Jim Oberg's assessment of the myths built up around the Challenger tragedy, politics at least at the Washington level were not as strong as believed in terms of getting the Space Shuttle into orbit for Reagan.

In fact I distinctly recall two separate newspaper items about how at first Reagan and his staff had to be told about what happened, then a later item declaring that they were watching the launch live (which it was being shown on TV, but only on CNN). Something tells me the first item was the more accurate one.

Two other tidbits that will be lost to history otherwise: Johnny Carson on NBC's Tonight Show and David Letterman (who back then followed Carson right after on the same network) made plenty of jokes in their monologues for days prior to the mission about the school teacher and how the Shuttle launch kept getting delayed and how super-technological NASA couldn't seem to get it to work.

Back then their comments had a lot more public impact and I am sure it made some kind of contribution to the NASA managers pushing to get the Shuttle up and avoid any more public ridicule.

And as with many such events that take up lots of television time - especially in the days before numerous TV news channels and the Web - a lot of people callusly called in to complain that their favorite shows were being interrupted by that "annoying" Shuttle explosion coverage.

Yeah, 1986 is starting to seem like a long time ago.