"Christa, In Her Own Words" "excerpted, Life, Feb. 1996:
"I can remember being in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite, there was still so much unknown about space. People though Mars was probably populated. We had this black-and-white television in our little ranch house and we always used to sit on the floor two noses away. We were sitting there when Alan Shepard went up, really excited that man was actually able to go up and come back down and be okay, I have the Life magazine of the men walking on the moon. I have a box of papers at home of my own press coverage. When I'm sixty, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, 'What really happened that year?'
"I had an opportunity to watch a liftoff. I can remember just feeling the sense of exhilaration when the shuttle went off. If anything the over-riding emotion of our launch is gonna just be excitement. I remember astronaut David Leetsma saying that he was so excited at liftoff the adrenaline didn't stop running for five hours.
We haven't sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, 'Now you realize that there's X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen.' If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came... They're space kids. Every shuttle mission's been successful... They think going up in space is neat."
After receiving a school flag to take aboard the space shuttle McAuliffe told the assembled students, "I really don't want to say goodbye to any of you people." Adding that she would surely return for graduation ceremonies the following spring. It was in the same auditorium, four months later, that students watching a television monitor witnessed her spacecraft explosion.
"Three, two, one..."
"Roger. Go with throttle up," shuttle commander, Dick Scobee radioed on a freezing January morning in 1986. His daughter, Kathie, 25, huddled with her mother, brother and infant son on a roof at Cape Canaveral, along with the assembled families of the six other Challenger astronauts about to blast into space. She felt the rumble of the liftoff and hugged her baby closer in the cold. "Wow, look how pretty," she said 74 seconds later.
"Is that normal?" somebody else in the crowd asked.
"They're gone," said Jane, wife of pilot Michael Smith.
"What do you mean, Mom?" asked her son.
"They're lost," she replied.
Shortly after the last funerals were held, a commission chaired by former Secretary of State William Rogers revealed the conclusions of its investigations: the explosion of the $1.2 billion spacecraft was due to a faulty O-ring seal on the solid rocket fuel booster, a $900 synthetic rubber band that engineers had warned was vulnerable at temperatures below 51 degrees. The Challenger launch, canceled three times, had finally taken place in 35 degree weather. The Rogers Commission found both the company that made the O-rings and NASA itself guilty of allowing an avoidable accident to occur.
At the outset of a search for shuttle debris that would take seven months, 31 ships, 52 aircraft and 6,000 workers, Christa McAuliffe's lesson plans for space were found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.
