Hello, I'm Frank Turner.

Welcome to Tales from No Man's Land, a podcast that accompanies my album, No Man's Land.

It's about 13 women from history, who you probably haven't heard of, but definitely should have.

Their stories are fascinating,

moving, funny, and most importantly, worth celebrating and sharing. Welcome back to the podcast,

and if this is your first visit, please do take the time to go back and listen to the

preceding episodes and all of the stories that we've been telling over the last few weeks.

Today's episode is about an event that I can vaguely remember from my childhood,

and an event that has certainly gone down in modern history.

In January 1986, NASA Space Shuttle Challenger took off for the 10th time.

Its previous missions had already included the first black and female astronauts into space,

and on this particular instance, they had a young civilian called Krista McCallif,

who was a primary school teacher on board.

Just 73 seconds after liftoff, the space shuttle exploded on live international television, and all seven people on board were killed.

I wrote the song Silent Key about what happened, about Krista McCallif,

and the events surrounding her death.

There's another reason why this song is interesting to me,

which is that I have actually already released it,

on the album Positive Songs for Negative People from 2015.

But for this particular take on it,

I wanted to include it on this album because it felt thematically of a piece

with the other material on No Man's Land,

...