Linnda Caporael
Associate Professor, Psychology and Science & Technology Studies

"Many of us have the experience of remembering where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news of a momentous event. Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, several of these type of events, both great and terrible, are related to space . . ." I do have vivid memories of what I was doing when the Apollo mission successfully landed on the moon. We lived in a small white house with white tile floors in Phoenix.  The television was on, but I was only partially watching it. My eye was on the baby. My son was an active crawler, and no house could be fully childproofed against his adventurous explorations.  The voices on the TV were climbing in pitch, filled with excitement. I turned to look for a minute, and then I looked back at my son. Suddenly I cried out, "oh, look-he's walking, he's walking!" But I wasn't looking at grainy black-and-white pictures of men in space suits, their motions slightly out of sync.  I was looking at my baby as he stood up by himself for the first time and took two steps before plopping down on his fanny.  Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man" had also been the first
small step for my son.

I also have a vivid, less complex memory of the Challenger disaster. I was
in the Faculty-Staff dining hall, standing in line to get my lunch, when we
heard the news. I don't think that the people around me fully understood
what happened-I know that I didn't at the time. Psychologists call the vivid
memories that surround great and momentous events "flashbulb memories."
People will frequently experience a memory in such detail that it seems as
if they are recalling a photograph, a moment frozen in time. Yet, further
research has shown that flashbulb memories can be false. We can remember an event in detail, yet other information makes it clear that the memory, real as it seems, is constructed. I have one of these connected to space, too. I stood in the schoolyard when our teacher announced that Barbara Shepard, a classmate and my school chum, died. The Sister also told us that the Soviets had launched a Sputnik into space.  As I was writing this remembrance, I checked the date of the Sputnik launching and discovered it must have happened years before my friend's death. Further checking suggests my friend must have died the same day Alan Shepard went into space (May 5, 1961). My false memory apparently used emotion (sadness and fear) to connect "death"and "Soviets", erasing what must have been the more obvious connection, the last names."