When I began developing my "Icarus Rising" site and related pages in the late 1990s and early 2000s, most Americans connected to the Internet with dial-up modems.  Bandwidth was narrow, downloads of large files seemingly took forever, and "streaming video" was an impossible dream for the average home Internet user on the slow end of a telephone line.  It was at that time that I was searching online for video of the Challenger disaster to include in this site, and in those searches I found that I would consistently come up with only fragments of the video footage (such as of the explosion itself), audio-only .wav files, or postage-stamp-sized video-only .mpg files, none of which, in my opinion, truly did justice to the memory of that day or to the memory of the seven brave souls who perished so publicly while seeking to forge another link to our future; therefore, in early 2002, I decided to create and post the complete video myself from my own materials.

Today, of course, video of the Challenger disaster is readily available on YouTube, no farther away than a Google search.  But in the early, dial-up years of the new millennium, the above video on this page was, to the best of my knowledge, the only complete full-length video of the Challenger space shuttle disaster available on the Internet.  Now, decades after the event, there is no longer a single American school student in grades one through twelve who was a student in school on that fateful morning when what was to be the "ultimate field trip" ended in tragedy, no longer a single grade-school or high school student who has a personal memory of sitting in a classroom or in an auditorium that day to watch the "Teacher in Space" present her lessons from the next frontier... only instead to watch her and her crewmates pass over to the final frontier.  It is for the sake of preserving the memory of these seven heroes and of their sacrifice that I have developed this site in general and this page in particular.