Reply #18: OK, maybe Challenger was not on that level

[customerserviceguy]

but Apollo 1 was. The space race was a proxy war with the Russians, and they had only launched Sputnik a decade before. President Kennedy had committed us to landing men on the moon, and he had only been assassinated barely more than three years before the Apollo 1 tragedy.

It was America's first loss of life in the space program, and it challenged us to our core, that maybe we couldn't accomplish everything we set out to do. Vietnam seemed quite winnable to the country at that point in time, and it shook the US to see national failure, where one had not been seen within living memory.