I watched that in elementary school. We were all lined up by class in rows in the gym. The teachers rolled in two small crt tv’s on roller carts. We could barely see it. When the shuttle blew up, they shut the tv’s off and we went back to our classes. We weren’t really old enough to really understand what happened at the time.

I’ve seen this pic/theory before, but never really seen a reason why they would fake it. Hundreds of thousands of moving parts sitting on top of volatile rocket fuel always seemed like a recipe for eventual disaster to me anyways.

Nothing at this point surprises me though.