When the Biggest Story of Your Career Happens Right in Front of Your Eyes
-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on January 28, 2026
That headline above probably makes you think I’m going to write about some of the important and dramatic news events seemingly happening daily in the U.S. right now. But I’m actually going to go back to 40 years ago today—January 28, 1986—when I stood on the front lawn of my TV station in Orlando and watched the beginning of what would be the biggest story I ever personally covered.
As I relate the events of that cold January day—yes, cold, even in central Florida—I want you to know that I can still see in crisp detail everything I’m about to tell you. The phrase “it’s as if it just happened yesterday” is a bit of an overused cliché, but I can remember every detail of this day 40 years ago better than I can remember any day last week. I had gotten up VERY early that morning. Even though I was my station’s (WESH-TV, the NBC affiliate) newly minted assignment editor, I was doing double duty as a live truck operator for the morning show that day. The reason—a record cold wave sweeping the state putting citrus and other agriculture at risk and causing power outages around the area as thousands of homes turned on their seldom-used electric heat all at the same time.
After putting in a full eight hours running the live truck for the morning show and then running the assignment desk for the entire morning, I was ready to head home.
I stuck around a bit past my quitting time because, even after a very busy news morning, the world’s eyes were focused on central Florida and what was set to happen at 11:38 am. NASA was launching the space shuttle Challenger on its tenth mission, made notable because included in the crew was the first “teacher in space,” Christa McAuliffe. Her addition to the flight was a publicity move by NASA to get people interested in the space shuttle program. After 24 routine missions, the program was no longer front-page news. But the teacher in space gambit had paid off and the entire nation was watching this mission carefully to see this smiling civilian giving her lessons from space.
Those not familiar with the sheer scope of space launches may find it hard to believe we could watch the launch from Orlando, some 70 miles from Launch Complex 39B where the shuttle would lift off. So, some 20 minutes before noon, I stood inside an edit bay in the newsroom to watch the shuttle engines ignite. It took about 15 seconds for the shuttle to get above the horizon from our vantage point, so I and a colleague (sports reporter at the station and former Mizzou classmate Bill Shafer) leisurely walked outside to watch it rise into the sky to our east.
Less than a minute after we arrived out on the station’s lawn, we saw the solid rocket boosters separate and fly off on their own.
At our distance, we couldn’t see the actual explosion that doomed the shuttle. So, well versed as I was in shuttle operations, I assumed this was what is called a “Return to Launch Site (RTLS)” abort, a move a shuttle in trouble could use to prevent reaching orbit and return safely to land at the Kennedy Space Center. That had never happened before so I knew it would be a big story and that I would not be going home after all. When I got back into the building, I found out what those who had stayed inside to watch the launch on camera already knew—the shuttle had been destroyed with all aboard. It hit me that I had just watched the first in-flight disaster in NASA history with my naked eyes.
The next 12 hours or so were a whirlwind, but not—as is the point of this writing—a blur. I moved back in to take over the assignment desk, first assessing where all our crews were. We had our Space Coast (the nickname for the central Florida coastline cities near the Kennedy Space Center) reporter and another crew at the launch, but most of our crews were out covering the cold wave and its agricultural impact (in-the-know readers may be aware the cold weather—down to 18 degrees Fahrenheit overnight at the launch pad—caused the disaster by allowing hot exhaust gas leaks in the frozen O-rings on the solid rocket boosters). More than a decade before cell phones became everyday tools for reporters, I had to track down my crews by radio, by calling sources with whom they were meeting or hoping they would call in once they heard the shuttle news. I eventually routed everyone to either get local reaction around Orlando or to head the Kennedy Space Center itself—including our helicopter which was in the air at the time of the Challenger explosion returning from carrying a crew to Tampa for a citrus commission meeting (military jets eventually forced our chopper down as NASA closed the airspace for miles around the launch site). I worked getting footage back in house from our crews covering the launch—including exclusive footage of the VIP viewing area with tragic scenes of McAuliffe’s family witnessing the explosion. I was able to locate the other finalists for Teacher in Space, again getting exclusive interviews with them as they returned by bus from the launch site to their hotels in Orlando.
It wasn’t until close the midnight—a full 12 hours after the launch and 20 hours since I first arrived at work that day—that I had a moment to breathe and think about what I had witnessed.
Even then, I don’t think I knew how much this would stick with me. As tired as I was, I can vividly recall thinking about how this could be the end of the space program, a program I had followed since I was a small child in front of the TV watching as Americans first when into space in the early 1960s. Now I was responsible for making some of the TV content people watched about the space program. Had I just watched this effort that had fascinated me for so long end before my eyes?
I went home and got a little bit of sleep, then was right back in the newsroom the next morning at 8 am. My days and weeks following that dark Tuesday in January were filled almost entirely with covering Challenger stories. I still remember—nearly word for word—a call from a viewer asking me what he should do with shuttle debris he had found on the beach near his home. I told him NASA was collecting as much as it could and would actually reassemble the shuttle in a hangar near the launch pad as part of its investigation. I also told him any debris could contain explosive bolts used in escape systems and that he should leave everything where he found it. I still remember the woman who called and told me she had never stood on her lawn and watched seven people die before. She pleaded with me for the station to stop showing the explosion over and over again as part of our coverage. I relayed this message to our news director and he responded by limiting use of the actual explosion only to stories that needed that footage to specifically show what investigators were looking at for the cause. And I still remember the gruesome details we got in the newsroom—but decided not to air—about what divers found when they located the largely intact crew compartment lying on the ocean floor with the bodies of the astronauts inside. What we did report is that evidence there showed the astronauts were alive after the explosion and survived another two minutes as they fell back toward earth and fatal impact with the sea below.
What’s the point of writing about this 40 years after the fact?
Even though most of the big stories we journalists will remember as vividly as I remember the Challenger coverage are tragedies, I still feel lucky to enjoy a profession that gives memories like this. I don’t know how many other jobs deliver such vivid recall after four decades. Maybe it’s because they are tragedies that I find myself grateful for having covered them. I can also quickly recall many days leading our student reporters to tell important human stories during the great flood of 1993 (student work for which KOMU-TV won a professional Small Market Overall Excellence Murrow award the next year). The Challenger coverage, the flood coverage and others that still stick with me made a difference in the lives of people we talked to and the people who watched the stories. What we did mattered and helped people make sense of tragedies that deeply affected them.
Journalists can never know when the biggest stories they will cover will arrive. It will usually be unexpected and might not even seem that big when they first begin. That Tuesday morning on the lawn in Orlando, I thought I was going back inside to cover a significant space shuttle story—but not the biggest story of which I’d ever be a part. As the country goes through the current tumultuous times that are generating some very dark stories for us to cover, each day could produce the biggest story ever for someone covering it. My journalism career is approaching 50 years—I first started taking news photos and writing stories in high school. I’ve stuck with it a long time. But even those journalists who put a few years into our profession and then move on to something else will have their own biggest stories of their careers. I hope each will generate memories as vivid and precious as the ones I have from 1986. To me, it’s one of the many things that makes this profession so special.