Christa McAuliffe

McAuliffe was born in Boston, the oldest of five children of an accountant and a substitute teacher, and grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts, watching the early Mercury launches on television along with the rest of the country. She earned a history and education degree from Framingham State College in 1970, married Steven McAuliffe that same year, and followed him first to Washington and then to Concord, New Hampshire, teaching junior high history and civics in Maryland before landing at Concord High School in 1983, where she designed her own elective on the social history of American women alongside the standard courses in economics and law.

NASA had promised since 1984 to send an ordinary citizen into orbit, and in 1985 it chose a teacher to go first. McAuliffe was picked from more than 11,000 applicants and introduced by Vice President George H. W. Bush on July 19, 1985, with backup teacher Barbara Morgan standing beside her. She trained through the fall, preparing two 15-minute lessons she would broadcast live from orbit on subjects as basic as gravity and Newton's laws, alongside student experiments on chicken embryos and crystal growth. Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on January 28, 1986, and broke apart 73 seconds later, roughly 46,000 feet over the Atlantic, killing McAuliffe and the six career astronauts flying with her. She never delivered a lesson from space.

The mission existed partly to make spaceflight look routine again, and that framing is what made the failure land so hard. Millions of American schoolchildren, including McAuliffe's own students, watched the launch live in their classrooms because a teacher was aboard, and watched the vehicle come apart on the same screen instead. The Rogers Commission that investigated found NASA managers had known for years that the solid rocket booster's O-ring seals could fail in cold weather, and had launched anyway on a morning when the temperature at the pad was 36 degrees, overriding warnings raised the night before by the engineers who built the joint. McAuliffe left behind a husband and two children, nine and six years old.

Roughly 40 schools across the country now carry her name, along with a lunar crater, an asteroid, and the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center that opened in Concord in 1990. Barbara Morgan, her backup, finally flew to the International Space Station in 2007, more than two decades after the two of them trained together for a single flight. In 2024 New Hampshire unveiled a statue of McAuliffe at its State House, the first monument to a woman on the capitol grounds. NASA's Teacher in Space Project itself did not fly again after Challenger. It was folded into what became the Educator Astronaut Project, a quieter version of the same idea.

Christa McAuliffe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Teacher in Space Project other
  Selected from over 11,000 applicants nationwide 1985
• The Ultimate Field Trip speech
  Her working title for the two lessons she planned to broadcast from orbit 1985
• STS-51-L mission
  The Challenger mission she trained a year for and never flew 1986
• McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center building
  Planetarium and space-education center in Concord, New Hampshire, named in her honor 1990

• 1970 aged ~22 Graduates Framingham State College and marries Steven McAuliffe
• 1978 aged ~30 Earns a master's degree in education at Bowie State University
• 1983 aged ~35 Begins teaching at Concord High School in New Hampshire
• July 19, 1985 aged 36 Selected as the first Teacher in Space She was chosen from more than 11,000 applicants.
• January 28, 1986 aged 37 Dies when Challenger breaks apart 73 seconds after launch
• 1990 aged ~42 The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center opens in Concord
• 2007 aged ~59 Her backup, Barbara Morgan, finally flies to the International Space Station
• 2024 aged ~76 A statue of her is unveiled at the New Hampshire State House

• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. eulogized her on television
• Sally Ride 1951–2012
  First American woman in space and physicist who flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. served on the commission that investigated her death
• Richard Feynman 1918–1988
  Theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and his accessible teaching style. demonstrated why the O-rings failed
• George H. W. Bush 1924–2018
  41st president who managed the end of the Cold War and assembled the coalition for the Persian Gulf War. announced her selection