Owner Comments:
The year 1986 got off to an early and eventful start with the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger 73 seconds into flight on January 28th, 1986. I’m told this is one of those events where people tend to remember where they were when this happened, like 9/11 or the destruction of Columbia many years later. However, while this happened in my birth year, it falls outside the span of my life - neither my wife nor I were born until after some of the more historically significant events of the year, this one included.
The crew included a teacher that had been trained to go on the mission when it launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Because of this the shuttle program was suspended for two years while a special commission investigated the event. The cause was found to be the failure of O-rings in the rockets under cold weather conditions, but the commission also found heavy fault with NASA and the culture of the organization with regard to safety and hazard analysis in decision making.
The incident and the decisions that lead up to it became a major case study in engineering ethics and safety engineering that I’d later hear about many times during my time at Texas A&M as an undergraduate engineering student - especially after the subsequent loss of Colombia for some similar reasons in 2003, just a couple of years before I went to college starting in 2005.
I do remember where I was when I found out that Colombia had been lost.
97.5% Zinc, 2.5% copper (Copper-Plated Zinc)
Mintage: 4,491,395,493
2.5 grams
19mm diameter
Engraver: Victor D Brenner (Obverse), Frank Gasparro (Reverse)
Lincoln Memorial Reverse (1959-2008)
I no longer have access to information on exactly when this coin was purchased or how. But it wasn’t one of the coins we sent in to get graded ourselves. Choya might have the information - he has long kept the records of such things in spreadsheets on his computer that may or may not have been destroyed or lost through the years. It was probably bought through eBay though and it was added before the set won the Best in Category award in 2008 - so we replaced the coin we had graded with a better one pretty much immediately.
We actually upgraded / replaced 5 of the 9 coins submitted to NGC in that submission with better coins before we won the Best in Category in 2008, within months of sending them in, because the coins we sent in just graded out so poorly and we were able to go get better grades for cheap so easily. And then we didn’t upgrade or change the set again for 10 years, when we bought 2 upgrades for the set in November 2018.
That submission of those coins for these mint sets was all the proof I needed at the time that I didn’t need to be submitting coins myself until I learned more and I didn’t submit coins to NGC again for about 10 or 12 years after that disaster.