It's been 40 years since the Challenger space shuttle disaster claimed the lives of all seven crew members, and people from Connecticut with close ties to the national tragedy are remembering the lives that were lost.

Among those in Cape Canaveral that day were a group of high school students from Norwalk as well as a News 12 Connecticut film crew.

John Bonhage, a then-Brien McMahon high school student, was one of the winners of an essay contest sponsored by Norden Systems, a then-Norwalk company that manufactured parts of the rocket boosters attached to the space shuttle.

"At the time, we didn't have digital cameras. We had 35-millimeter cameras," Bonhage says. "We're clicking pictures, and I remember going through a whole roll of film. I was in the process of changing that film, and all of a sudden, I look up and I can see, not one plume of smoke in the sky, but there was now a series of them."

Barbara Nidzgorski, a lifelong educator and former Greenwich teacher, was almost onboard the Challenger.

She applied to the Teacher in Space program while working at Riverside elementary school and was named one of the finalists for Connecticut.

"It could have been me," Nidzgorski says. "It was an incredible group of people. I think I fell on the floor, I can't even remember. You can relive every second from the moment you got up that morning, until the moment you found out what happened."

The shuttle blew up 73 seconds after launch.

Those killed included Christa McAuliffe, who was supposed to be the first teacher in space.

"It was a horrible experience to be there," says Bonhage. "But for me, it's not nearly as horrible as the families that lost their loved ones. Their siblings, their friends, their family... their child."

The tragedy shut down NASA's shuttle program for nearly three years while it investigated what went wrong.  

Ultimately, a rubber seal on a fuel tank failed due to that morning's unusually cold temperatures.