Christa McAuliffe

Sharon Christa Corrigan was born on September 2, 1948, in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of five children of Edward Corrigan, an accountant, and Grace Corrigan, a homemaker who later became a teacher's aide ^[1]. The family settled in Framingham, a suburb west of Boston, where Christa grew up during the opening years of the space race. She was in grade school when Alan Shepard made the first American spaceflight in 1961, and she later recalled following the Mercury and Apollo programs with the sense that space belonged to her generation ^[2].

At Marian High School in Framingham, a Catholic school she attended from 1962 to 1966, Christa played softball, sang in the glee club, and met Steven McAuliffe, the classmate she would eventually marry ^[2]. Friends and teachers remembered her as sociable and organized rather than a standout student, someone who worked steadily and took on responsibility without fuss ^[1].

She enrolled at Framingham State College in 1966 and graduated in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in history ^[3]. Weeks after graduation she married Steven McAuliffe, and the couple moved to the Washington, D.C. area so that he could attend Georgetown University Law Center ^[2].

McAuliffe began teaching in 1970 in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. She taught American history at Benjamin Foulois Junior High School in Morningside, then moved to Thomas Johnson Middle School in Lanham, where she taught history and civics for most of the decade ^[2]. While raising her son Scott, born in 1976, she completed a master's degree in education supervision and administration at Bowie State College in 1978 ^[1].

That same year the family relocated to Concord, New Hampshire, where Steven took a position as an assistant to the state attorney general. Their daughter Caroline was born in 1979. Christa taught in Concord area schools, first at Bow Memorial School and then at Concord High School, which she joined in 1982 as a social studies teacher ^[3].

At Concord High she taught economics, law, and American history, and she designed a course of her own called The American Woman, which examined United States history through the diaries, letters, and daily lives of ordinary women ^[2]. That approach, treating common people as historical witnesses, shaped the journal project she later proposed to NASA. Colleagues described a teacher who favored field trips and primary documents over lectures, and who told students that ordinary people who kept records were the real chroniclers of history ^[1].

In August 1984 President Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space Project, a NASA program intended to send an educator into orbit as the first private citizen aboard the Space Shuttle ^[4]. The agency framed the flight as a way to honor teachers and to renew student interest in science, mathematics, and spaceflight. More than 11,000 teachers applied ^[4].

McAuliffe submitted her application near the deadline. Her proposal was characteristically modest: she would keep a journal of the experience, from selection through training and flight, in the tradition of the pioneer women whose diaries she taught. She wrote in her application essay that she wanted to humanize the space age by observing it as an ordinary person ^[2].

The field was narrowed to 114 semifinalists, then to ten finalists who underwent medical examinations and briefings at Johnson Space Center in Houston. On July 19, 1985, Vice President George Bush announced at the White House that McAuliffe had been chosen, with Idaho elementary teacher Barbara Morgan as her backup ^[4]. In brief remarks that day McAuliffe spoke of the honor of representing teachers, and she became an immediate national figure, appearing on television programs and giving interviews throughout the fall of 1985 ^[1].

McAuliffe took a year's leave from Concord High School and reported to Johnson Space Center in September 1985 for training as a payload specialist ^[4]. Over roughly four months she and Morgan completed instruction in shuttle systems, microgravity adaptation, emergency procedures, and flights aboard NASA's reduced gravity aircraft. Astronauts and trainers noted that she approached the work as a student, asking questions freely and admitting what she did not know ^[2].

She was assigned to mission STS-51-L aboard Challenger, flying with commander Francis Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, and Ronald McNair, and fellow payload specialist Gregory Jarvis ^[5]. The mission's primary tasks included deploying a tracking and data relay satellite and observing Halley's Comet with a free flying instrument platform.

McAuliffe's own assignment was educational. She prepared two live lessons to be broadcast to classrooms on the fourth day of the flight: a tour of the orbiter she called The Ultimate Field Trip, and a lesson on why humans fly in space, covering microgravity, technology, and exploration ^[4]. She also planned filmed demonstrations on hydroponics, magnetism, Newton's laws, and effervescence in weightlessness. Millions of schoolchildren were expected to watch, and many schools arranged to view the launch itself on live television ^[6].

Challenger's launch was postponed several times in January 1986 by weather and technical delays. On the morning of January 28 the temperature at Kennedy Space Center had fallen below freezing overnight, the coldest conditions under which a shuttle had ever been launched ^[5]. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the contractor for the solid rocket boosters, had argued the night before against launching in the cold, but their concerns did not stop the countdown ^[5].

Challenger lifted off at 11:38 a.m. Eastern time. Seventy three seconds into flight the vehicle broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing all seven crew members ^[6]. Because of McAuliffe's presence, an unusually large audience of students and teachers watched the failure as it happened, and the event became one of the most widely witnessed disasters in American broadcast history ^[6].

The presidential commission chaired by William Rogers concluded in June 1986 that the accident was caused by the failure of an O-ring seal in a joint of the right solid rocket booster, its resilience degraded by the cold, and that flawed decision making within NASA and its contractor had allowed known seal problems to go uncorrected ^[5]. The shuttle fleet was grounded for more than two and a half years, and NASA cancelled plans to fly private citizens. McAuliffe was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Concord ^[1].

Few American teachers have been memorialized as widely as Christa McAuliffe. Dozens of schools across the United States and abroad carry her name, along with a crater on the Moon, an asteroid, and scholarships and fellowships for educators ^[3]. In Concord, the planetarium opened in her memory in 1990 later became the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, honoring both McAuliffe and Alan Shepard, New Hampshire's two space travelers ^[7]. Framingham State University, her alma mater, operates the Christa McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science Learning, which continues her educational mission through simulated space missions and teacher programs ^[3].

Her influence on space education outlasted the tragedy. Barbara Morgan, her backup, remained with NASA, became a full mission specialist, and flew to the International Space Station aboard Endeavour in 2007, twenty one years after Challenger ^[4]. In 2018, astronauts Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold, both former teachers, filmed several of McAuliffe's planned science demonstrations aboard the station so that her lost lessons could finally reach classrooms ^[8].

In 2004 McAuliffe and her six crewmates were posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor ^[4]. Anyone asking who was Christa McAuliffe finds a figure remembered less for what she did in space than for what she represented: the claim that spaceflight, and history itself, belonged to ordinary people. Her remark that she touched the future because she taught remains one of the most quoted statements about the teaching profession, and any honest account of Christa McAuliffe facts must weigh both the loss and the durability of that idea ^[1].