The space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff on January 28, 1986—twenty-five years ago today. The disaster took the lives of six astronauts and one schoolteacher, and shook NASA to its core. Like other televised national traumas, it burned itself into the memories of millions of people. I was just a spectator to the catastrophe, watching speechless and horrified along with everyone else as the video clips were played and replayed on television. But that day altered the direction of my life in unusually concrete ways, and I can’t let the anniversary pass without a bit of reflection.

In January 1986 I was a 19-year-old freshman at Harvard College. On the morning of January 28, I was working on an assignment in the computer room at the university’s science center, and a student who had just taken a seat at the terminal next to mine mentioned the accident. I didn’t believe him at first. But he seemed serious enough about the story to make me nervous.

This was years before the advent of the Web—I couldn’t simply log on and check the news. So I got up and literally ran back to my dorm room, where my roommates and I had a small color TV. I remember thinking, as I charged through Harvard Yard, that the story couldn’t possibly be true. Hadn’t the shuttle traveled safely into space dozens of times before? Didn’t the engineers at NASA know how to prevent such a disaster? But sure enough, when I turned on the TV, there were the images of the spaceship disintegrating against an azure sky, sending tendrils of smoke and flames in all directions.

Like many people that day, I spent hours watching the coverage unfold, culminating with President Reagan’s eloquent televised address. The horror of the event was immediate for me. It was awful to imagine what the seven crew members must have experienced as the shuttle broke up, and to realize what a huge setback the accident represented for the U.S. space program, which I had followed with zeal since I was old enough to watch TV.

But the disaster’s real influence settled in only over the next several months, as investigators such as physicist Richard Feynman worked out the chain of events that had led to the explosion. As it turned out, a rubber O-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters, stiffened by that morning’s cold weather, had failed, allowing flames to burst through, in turn causing the shuttle’s main fuel tank to explode. It was such a predictable and seemingly preventable problem that for the first time in my life I began to question NASA’s competence, and to understand just how important the human element in any large technological system can be. On a broader level, I began to look at all technological and scientific endeavors with a much more skeptical—-one might even say disillusioned—eye.

I had a work-study job that year doing data analysis for an X-ray astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Within weeks after the accident it was clear that the massive satellite that this astronomer had been helping to design, which had been scheduled to go into space aboard a shuttle, would be delayed for years while NASA retrenched. This was a big professional blow for him, and for many other scientists whose instruments could only get into space aboard the shuttle; it affected the whole mood at the center over the following months. This, in turn, contributed to my own growing disenchantment with the job and with my long-cherished idea of becoming an astronomer or astrophysicist. (I hasten to add that I wasn’t very good at math, which would have derailed my plans eventually anyway.)

By the end of my sophomore year, less than a year and a half after the Challenger disaster, I had decided to switch majors from physics and astronomy to the history of science. In this discipline, my professors encouraged me to think skeptically about ideas that I had previously accepted uncritically, such as “American know-how” and the inevitability of technological progress. Eventually I went on to graduate studies in the history of technology at MIT and wrote a doctoral thesis about the social and political effects of technological disasters. That, in turn, helped launch me on a career in science and technology journalism. (Though there were also plenty of other influences—such as my unexpected detour into campus journalism at the Harvard Independent, and a chance encounter with Carl Sagan. But that’s another story.)

For me, the Challenger disaster hit at the moment when I was perhaps most impressionable—when I was in the middle of defining my world-view and choosing my future. It taught me that the world was full of risks I hadn’t contemplated; that America was not invulnerable; that extravagant endeavours can go extravagantly wrong. These are all lessons that people slightly older than myself probably learned from Vietnam, Apollo 13, and Watergate—and we certainly relearned them as a nation when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 and the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003. But for me, Challenger was the veil-lifting moment. And it’s all still symbolized in my mind by the iconic TV images of the exploding spacecraft, its twin boosters veering across the sky like ghostly fireworks.

This article is adapted from an essay I originally wrote for the book A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Holly Barlow Sweet (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009). Republished by permission.

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Those of us who are lucky enough to work as journalists (and who get to write the first draft of history) often remember the dates when the important and even not-so-important events went down. After 30 years in the news business, it’s become almost second nature for me. Today marks a special day, both personally and professionally, because it’s been exactly one year since we officially launched Xconomy’s San Diego website.

My Xconomy debut began with “San Diego 92037,” a curtain-raiser that sought to explain why the prestigious La Jolla zip code that encompasses Torrey Pines Mesa represents the epicenter of technology innovation here—and it’s been more-or-less non-stop ever since. In the past year, we’ve published close to 1,415 news stories, briefs, and commentaries about the innovation leaders, businesses, technologies, and trends that make up the “exponential” part of the San Diego economy.

With the launch of our San Diego website last year, Xconomy founder and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi wrote: “Smart, in-depth local coverage of an innovation community is, we think, central to the health and vitality of that community. But we also believe that good local stories—the ones we aim to tell in each of the three cities we now cover—can yield important insights into national and global trends.” Bob likes to say that the focus of our coverage is on local stories that have a global impact.

Hindsight isn’t always 20-20, but looking back over the past year certainly can add some perspective to the stories where the impact has become more apparent.

This week, for example, the Algal Biomass Association will convene in San Diego for its annual biomass summit at least partly because this region has become a global hub for algae-based research, technologies, and industries. For Xconomy readers, this became clear as we got an exclusive interview with the CEO of San Diego’s Sapphire Energy, charted the formation of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, and chronicled the partnership that San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics struck with ExxonMobil, which plans to spend $600 million to develop algae biofuels.

A few other stories from our first year also exemplify Xconomy’s mission of pursuing local stories with global impact:

—The ouster last week of Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) CEO Harry Stylli, along with several other top executives and employees, followed a five-month internal inquiry that has left … Next Page »

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I’m extremely pleased to report that Xconomy’s headquarters in Cambridge are jam packed this week, since everybody flew in from our Seattle and San Diego offices for the inaugural XSITE—Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship—yesterday at Boston University. It’s a rare treat to have everybody together and, fortuitously, we’re also coming up on the second anniversary (this Saturday) of publishing Xconomy.com.

Today and tomorrow we’ll be taking a little time to celebrate that milestone and taking advantage of the surplus of colleagues (and working around the deficit of space) to work on making the site even better in the years to come. As always, we welcome the comments and suggestions of our readers—you can reach us at editors@xconomy.com or simply post in the comments below.

Our own posting will be light today and tomorrow, but we’ll be back Monday full force. Thanks to our incredible team for making Xconomy such a success and so damn fun to put together each day. Thanks to our underwriters, sponsors, and partners for two years of exceptional support (and in the case of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, for solving our aforementioned space problem). And thanks to all of you for reading, participating in our events, sharing your ideas and opinions, and helping us to build our network. We’re all looking forward to the next two years.

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Updated Nov. 5 with comments from senior vice president Rick Rashid (see below): You did good, Bill Gates. When you decided to build a new computer-science research lab in Beijing in 1998, you probably saw it as a relatively low-risk venture with a high upside. It would be challenging and take a lot of work on the ground, sure, but Microsoft would benefit from tapping top researchers in China and giving back to the local computer-science community, thereby earning good will in a country with huge market potential. From most appearances, the bet has paid off.

Microsoft Research Asia, which turns 10 years old today, is the largest of the company’s research labs outside of Redmond. (The others are located in Silicon Valley; Cambridge, England; Bangalore, India; and the newest one in Cambridge, MA.) It has about 350 full-time researchers and engineers, has employed 2,500 student interns, and has published some 3,000 papers in technical journals and conferences. More than 250 technologies from the lab have apparently been transferred into Microsoft products, including Office, Windows, Xbox, and MSN. Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold and senior vice president of research Rick Rashid played key roles in establishing the Chinese lab. (You can read more about its rise, and its impact on Microsoft, China, and information technology, in this book by a couple of Xconomy authors.)

This week is about celebrating with the community in Beijing—and getting work done at the same time. The Microsoft festivities include a faculty summit involving hundreds of visiting professors and administrators from the Asia-Pacific region, a technical advisory board meeting, and several lab-hosted banquet dinners. Gates himself won’t be there, but he visited in August during the Olympics. Among the Redmond returnees is Harry Shum, Microsoft’s vice president for search product development, who was the previous head of the Beijing lab. Ya-Qin Zhang, the lab director before him, is now a vice president in charge of Microsoft’s R&D and sales in China. (Microsoft now employs some 5,000 people in China.) I’m guessing the only member of the lab’s founding team who won’t be there is Kai-Fu Lee, who now heads up Google Greater China, after a high-profile split with Microsoft in 2005.

Rashid sent an e-mail to the lab and to the company’s top brass, including Gates and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer: “I could not be more proud of what has been accomplished. Today was a great milestone for MSR Asia and for Microsoft Research.”

Reached by e-mail yesterday, the Beijing lab’s current managing director, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, said he was “completely occupied” with the week’s events. Hon is a former Apple employee who started working for Microsoft in Redmond on speech and user interfaces in 1995. Born and raised in China, he helped launch the Beijing lab and did a fair bit of recruiting in the early days. Hon moved to Beijing in 2004 to join the lab as assistant managing director, and also headed the lab’s Search Technology Center.

Microsoft’s foreign research labs have always been about finding the best talent around the world, and the Beijing lab has been a pretty striking example of this strategy. “There’s no doubt China produces a lot of engineers, but 10 years ago, no one knew what their quality was, particularly when we talk about people who can do world-class research,” said Hon in a recent interview with a Microsoft press officer. “We proved we could find that top talent and give them an environment in which to succeed.”

The Beijing lab’s main technical areas have evolved somewhat over the years. The researchers now focus on user interfaces, multimedia, data-centric computing (with a recent emphasis on cloud computing), search and ads, and fundamentals like theory, systems, and networking. It will be interesting to see how the lab contributes to the company’s recent initiatives in Web-based software, services, and advertising, and in mobile software. Looking ahead, how does Hon want people to view the Beijing lab—and Microsoft as a whole? “I want them to continue to think of Microsoft as an innovator,” Hon said in the interview. “We have very fierce competition from high-tech companies and people generating new technologies. We cannot sit still.”

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