Christa McAuliffe

• 1. Introduction

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  Christa McAuliffe had a short, blunt answer when a talk-show host asked her about her coming mission. Appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, she said: "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on." The woman saying it was a teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. Why would a space agency hand a seat to a classroom teacher? What made her the person it wanted? And what became of the lessons she had planned to teach from orbit?

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• 2. A Girl From Framingham

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  Sharon Christa Corrigan was born in Boston on the 2nd of September 1948, the oldest of five children. Her father, Edward Christopher Corrigan, was an accountant of English and Irish descent. Her mother, Grace Mary, born Grace George, worked as a substitute teacher, and her own father was of Lebanese Maronite descent. Through that side, Christa was a great niece of the historian Philip Khuri Hitti.

  The year of her birth, Edward was finishing his sophomore year at Boston College. Soon afterward he took a job as an assistant comptroller at a Boston department store, and the family moved to Framingham, Massachusetts. Christa went by her middle name from an early age. As an adult she signed herself "S. Christa Corrigan" and later "S. Christa McAuliffe."

  At Marian High School in Framingham, she graduated in 1966. She then earned a bachelor's degree from Framingham State College, now Framingham State University, in 1970. Project Mercury and the Apollo Moon program shaped her youth. The day after John Glenn orbited the Earth in Friendship 7, she told a friend at school, "Do you realize that someday people will be going to the Moon? Maybe even taking a bus, and I want to do that!"

  Years later she put the same hunger on paper. On her NASA application form she wrote: "I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate."

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• 3. The Classroom Years

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  In 1970, McAuliffe married Steven J. McAuliffe, a boyfriend she had known since high school. He was that year's graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. The couple moved closer to Washington, D.C., so that he could attend the Georgetown University Law Center.

  Her first teaching job came the same year, at Benjamin Foulois Junior High in Morningside, Maryland, where she taught American history. From 1971 to 1978 she taught history and civics at Thomas Johnson Middle School in Lanham, Maryland. Alongside that work she completed a master's degree in education supervision and administration at Bowie State University.

  In 1978, Steven accepted a job as an assistant to the New Hampshire Attorney General, and the family relocated to Concord. There she taught seventh and eighth grade American history and English. She also taught ninth grade English in nearby Bow before moving to Concord High School in 1983. The McAuliffes had two children, Scott and Caroline, who were nine and six when she died.

  At Concord High she taught American history, law and economics, plus a course she designed herself called "The American Woman." Field trips and visiting speakers were central to her method. According to The New York Times, she "emphasized the impact of ordinary people on history, saying they were as important to the historical record as kings, politicians or generals."

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• 4. Teacher in Space

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  In 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space Project, and NASA began searching for its first civilian passenger from the world of education. The agency wanted an "ordinary person," a gifted teacher who could talk with students while in orbit. The reasons were practical as well as symbolic. NASA hoped the flight would raise public interest in the Space Shuttle program and show that spaceflight was reliable, at a time when it faced steady pressure to find funding. Reagan added that it would remind Americans how much teachers matter.

  NASA chose the Council of Chief State School Officers, a non-profit group of public education officials, to run the selection. More than 11,000 teachers applied, and McAuliffe was among them. State, territorial and agency review panels nominated 114 semi-finalists, and New Hampshire put forward two teachers, McAuliffe being one. The semi-finalists gathered in Washington, D.C., from the 22nd to the 27th of June 1985 for a conference on space education. There they met the panel that would pick ten finalists.

  On the 1st of July 1985, McAuliffe learned she was a finalist. On the 7th of July she traveled to the Johnson Space Center for a week of thorough medical examinations and briefings on spaceflight. A committee of senior NASA officials interviewed the finalists and made its recommendations to NASA Administrator James M. Beggs.

  Mark Travis of the Concord Monitor said it was her manner that set her apart. NASA official Alan Ladwig remarked that "she had an infectious enthusiasm." NASA psychiatrist Terrence McGuire told New Woman magazine that "she was the most broad-based, best-balanced person of the 10."

  On the 19th of July 1985, Vice President George H. W. Bush announced the choice. McAuliffe would fly, and a fellow teacher named Barbara Morgan would serve as her backup.

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• 5. Lessons From Orbit

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  Later in 1985, McAuliffe and Morgan each took a year-long leave of absence from their schools to train for a Space Shuttle mission in early 1986. NASA paid both of their salaries. McAuliffe was not a member of the NASA Astronaut Corps. She was assigned to the crew of STS-51-L as a payload specialist.

  Her planned duties covered basic science experiments in chromatography, hydroponics, magnetism and Newton's laws. She also prepared two 15-minute classes to be taught from space. The first, "The Ultimate Field Trip," would tour the spacecraft. The second, "Where We've Been, Where We're Going, Why," would explain the benefits of space travel. Closed-circuit television was to carry both lessons to millions of schoolchildren.

  Once she was chosen, television producers wanted her. She appeared on Good Morning America, the CBS Morning News and the Today Show, among other programs. She had an immediate rapport with the media, and the Teacher in Space Project drew popular attention as a result.

  She also meant to keep a record of the trip. McAuliffe planned a personal journal, in the spirit of a "woman on the Conestoga wagons pioneering the West."

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• 6. Seventy-Three Seconds

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  On the 28th of January 1986, McAuliffe boarded Challenger alongside the six other crew members of STS-51-L. Only 73 seconds into the flight, at an altitude of 48,000 feet, the shuttle broke apart. All seven crew members died.

  NASA has said the accident hit the nation so hard partly because of the excitement around McAuliffe's presence. Many schoolchildren were watching the launch live, and news coverage of the disaster was extensive. McAuliffe was buried at Blossom Hill Cemetery in her hometown of Concord.

  Barbara Morgan, her backup, later carried the idea forward. In January 1998 she became a professional astronaut. On the 8th of August 2007 she flew on mission STS-118 to the International Space Station, aboard Endeavour, the orbiter built to replace Challenger.

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• 7. Names Across the Sky

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  About 40 schools around the world carry McAuliffe's name. They include the Christa McAuliffe Intermediate School in Brooklyn, New York, and the S. Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in Lowell, Massachusetts. Another is the Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Jackson, New Jersey. At Bowie State University, her alma mater, a residential and wellness community bears her name. At Framingham State, her parents worked with the college to establish the McAuliffe Center.

  In 1990, her hometown of Concord opened the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, dedicated to New Hampshire space pioneers Christa McAuliffe and Alan Shepard. The air and space museum covers 45,000 square feet and displays a vintage Crusader jet. Its planetarium is one of only five in North America with a 10K projection system.

  The same year, in Pleasant Grove, Utah, an educator named Victor Williamson started the Christa McAuliffe Space Center at Central Elementary School. It occupies a 4,000-square-foot building added onto the school. Students fly simulated missions in space flight simulators, and the first one, Voyager, proved so popular that more ships were commissioned. A new planetarium was added in 2020.

  Teaching programs carry her name too. The Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference has met in Nashua, New Hampshire, every year since 1986. The Nebraska McAuliffe Prize honors one Nebraska teacher each year for courage and excellence. Grants for innovative teachers come from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the National Council for the Social Studies.

  Her name is also written on other worlds. Asteroid 3352 McAuliffe and a crater on the Moon are named for her. So is a crater on Venus, which the Soviet Union named McAuliffe.

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• 8. Honors and Remembrance

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  The Daytona 500 NASCAR race honored McAuliffe in 1986, and later that year she was posthumously awarded the Frank J. Malina Astronautics Medal.

  Her family kept going. Steven later remarried, and in 1992 he became a federal judge on the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire in Concord. Her son, Scott, completed graduate studies in marine biology. Her daughter, Caroline, followed her mother into teaching.

  On the 28th of January 2016, several teachers who had competed with McAuliffe for the Challenger seat traveled to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a 30th anniversary remembrance service. Steven and Scott joined them. Steven observed that "Challenger will always be an event that occurred just recently. Our thoughts and memories of Christa will always be fresh and comforting."

  On the 23rd of July 2004, President George W. Bush posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to McAuliffe and the 13 other astronauts lost in the Challenger and Columbia disasters. In 2017 she was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. In 2019, Congress passed the Christa McAuliffe Commemorative Coin Act, which President Donald Trump signed on the 9th of October 2019. It allowed the Treasury Department to issue up to 350,000 silver dollar coins, and they were minted in 2021.

  Screen and page have kept her in view. Karen Allen played her in the 1990 TV movie Challenger. The spaceship in the 1996-1997 children's series Space Cases was named Christa. The documentary Christa McAuliffe: Reach for the Stars premiered in 2005, and CNN aired it more than 20 times in January 2006. Michelle Williams was cast as McAuliffe in The Challenger in 2018, and Erika Waldorf played her in The Challenger Disaster in 2019. In 2024, New Hampshire PBS released Christa: From Ordinary to Extraordinary.

  On the 2nd of September 2024, which would have been her 76th birthday, a statue of McAuliffe was unveiled at the New Hampshire State Capitol. Sculptor Benjamin Victor made it, and it is the first statue of a woman on the State House grounds. A line from her is inscribed on the side of the pedestal: "I touch the future, I teach."

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