Thanks to NASA engineer Lynda Gavin for sharing her memories of that day:

I was a co-op at the time (early 20's - not yet graduated from college), and was at NASA for one of my semester tours with Flight Design in building 17 watching the launch with many of my colleagues. I remember that everyone around me was just stunned.

We were in Flight Design manager Jon Harpold's corner office. He had one of the few TVs around. There were about a dozen of us trajectory types watching the launch on NASA Select. All of us in the room immediately knew from the visuals that something had gone terribly wrong with the vehicle, but of course we had no idea what. We all sat there stunned for maybe a half an hour. We talked about what some of our colleagues in the control room must be doing - we had no idea what they were being told to do, only that they were not allowed to leave for quite some time.

Eventually we went back to our offices. Some of the guys started conducting prayer groups. I was not particularly into prayers, let alone group prayers, but joining in seemed like the right thing to do. I don't remember much after that, that day.

I remember when President Reagan came for the funeral service. The whole of JSC was out standing between the duck ponds to listen to him and the couple of ministers that were with him. I don't remember specifics of what was said, but I remember wondering how that many people could be in one place and be so quiet and so focused and so somber. After he was done speaking, some of the astronauts flew over in T-38's in the missing man formation. I had never seen or heard of that before - it was very moving. I'll never forget that.