Although the dedication of remembrance to those people who passed away and the reannouncement of the achievements they reached before were one of the essential purposes of a memorial speech, the more significant part of it is to tell other people what they should do and what they should believe. On January 28th, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and broke apart on takeoff, all 7 of the astronauts lost their lives in this accident. On the same day, Reagan changed his original plan from reporting on the state of the Union to this memorial speech. He mentioned this on purpose, as we can see in the first sentence, he said: “I’d planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans.” From his perspective, he would probably like to emphasize the importance of this speech and the attitude he showed during the event, since the trade-off of rescheduling a speech is much higher than just making a new one.
There’s an unexpected feature that he didn’t emphasize anything from a perspective of technological failure or reflecting on this event to ensure the technical security that the same problems won’t happen again in the future, instead, the main focus of this speech is to mourn the 7 astronauts and to explain this incident as a brave behavior, after that he used it to promote the sense of this bravery to the audiences. Specifically, he mentioned, “the future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.” This sentence seems to be just an encouragement for the astronauts, but a deeper interpretation would be a promotion of the spirit of exploring new things and not being afraid of the consequences of failure. Even if the consequence was death, they still provided valuable progress to the world. From another broader perspective, this accident may significantly slow down future scientific progress because the case of danger illustrated by this accident makes it easier for people to give up out of fear when confronting potential danger. In this case, this speech successfully spread the right ideology to prevent this fear of death, which encourages people to continue exploring like this bravely without fear of failure or death in the future.
Above that, Reagan demonstrates their values that are beyond the things they did during this accident as well by shaping their characteristics when confronting death. In his speech, he said “that special grace, that special spirit that says, ‘Give me a challenge, and I’ll meet it with joy’”. The second half of this sentence inferred their attitude while facing danger, which he argues that the 7 astronauts faced danger with joy instead of fear or ignorance. This argument basically illustrates the courageous character the astronauts had, and this allows people to have a different perspective when coming to view this case. In addition, it helped explain that death is not completely a bad outcome as they had expected. People might think of this accident as a helpless scene before listening to the speech, but it helped them to move beyond the grief and made them aware of their brave spirit. In conclusion, Reagan’s speech, as well as all memorial speeches, did not solely focus on death, but emphasized these deaths to reflect deeper understandings and to show other people how to inherit their legacy and perform them in the future as well.