Christa McAuliffe

Christa McAuliffe: The Teacher Who Never Got to Teach the Lesson

Of the seven people aboard Space Shuttle *Challenger* on the morning of 28 January 1986, six were professionals of flight and engineering. The seventh had spent the previous fifteen years in junior high and high school classrooms in Maryland and New Hampshire, and her assignment in orbit was to talk — to broadcast lessons down to American schoolchildren by public television. She had described the prospect as "a teacher's dream." The shuttle lifted off at 11:38:00 EST and broke apart seventy-three seconds later, in front of an audience of children who had been assembled in school halls specifically to watch her.

An Entirely Ordinary Career

Sharon Christa Corrigan was born on 2 September 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Framingham, where she graduated from Marian High School in 1966. She took her bachelor's degree from Framingham State College in 1970 and, the same year, married Steven McAuliffe. A master's degree from Bowie State College in Maryland followed in 1978.

Her teaching record is a portrait of the profession's unglamorous middle. Benjamin Foulois Junior High in Maryland, 1970 to 1971: eighth-grade American history. Thomas Johnson Junior High, 1971 to 1978: English, American history, civics. Rundlett Junior High in New Hampshire, 1978 to 1979: seventh- and eighth-grade American history. Bow Memorial School, 1980 to 1982: ninth-grade social studies. And from 1982, Concord High School in New Hampshire, where she taught economics, law and American history — and designed a course of her own, "The American Woman." She taught religious education and worked with programmes for underprivileged students. Nothing in any of it suggested a national figure.

Eleven Thousand Applications

The Teacher in Space Project grew out of a 1983 NASA task force, was endorsed by administrator James Beggs, and was announced by President Ronald Reagan on 27 August 1984. Its logic was frankly promotional: the shuttle was roomy enough to carry a passenger, and NASA wanted a civilian who could make Americans care about spaceflight again. Roughly 11,000 educators applied. The field was cut to ten finalists, and on 19 July 1985 McAuliffe was named the primary candidate, with Barbara Morgan as her backup.

It is worth being precise about the criterion. NASA was not searching for the most scientifically accomplished teacher in the United States. It was searching for the one most able to excite the public — a communication test, and McAuliffe won it decisively. She became an instant celebrity, appearing on *The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson* with a composure that surprised people who had expected a nervous schoolteacher.

Payload Specialist

She trained for several months at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston alongside the six career crew members, learning to live and work in microgravity and rehearsing on camera the science lessons she intended to deliver from orbit. The launch was pushed back repeatedly by weather; an attempt on 27 January 1986 was scrubbed. Before she left, she told her Concord High students: "Push yourself as far as you can, because if I can get this far, you can do it, too."

Seventy-Three Seconds

*Challenger* launched on the morning of 28 January 1986 and exploded seventy-three seconds after liftoff, off Cape Canaveral. The public affairs commentary — "a major malfunction" and then "the vehicle has exploded" — became one of the most replayed passages of audio in American history. All seven aboard were killed: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. She was thirty-seven.

The investigation established that O-ring seals had failed in the unusual cold, and that engineers' warnings about launching in those temperatures had been overridden. That finding transformed grief into something harder. McAuliffe's father later wrote that his daughter had died *because* of NASA — a judgement the families found devastating precisely because it was defensible.

Why Christa Is Called a Genius

The word does not fit her the way it fits a scientist, and the honest version of the claim has to start by conceding that. McAuliffe discovered nothing, published nothing, and never delivered the lessons she trained for. She was not chosen for scientific brilliance; NASA said openly that it was looking for a communicator rather than a specialist. Her classroom record was competent and conventional. If genius means original intellectual production, she does not qualify and would have been the first to say so.

What she did possess, and what the selection process actually measured, is a genuinely scarce aptitude: the ability to make a subject vivid to people who have no reason to care about it, and to do so under pressure and on camera. Eleven thousand American teachers entered a competition judged almost entirely on that quality; she won it. The evidence is behavioural rather than academic — the poise on network television, the willingness to design her own course on American women rather than teach the syllabus she was handed, the instinct to frame her own extraordinary selection as an argument to her students about their capacities rather than about hers. "Reach for it," she told them. "Push yourself as far as you can."

That is pedagogical craft, not intellect, and it deserves the same respect athletes get for physical craft: it is a rare, trainable, mostly untaught skill at which very few people are excellent. The counter-case remains substantial. Her fame is inseparable from her death, and a life cut off at thirty-seven leaves too little evidence to rank. Had *Challenger* flown safely, she would very likely have returned to Concord High and been remembered locally. What can be said without inflation is that a system designed to find the single most compelling teacher in a country of millions looked hard and chose her.

Legacy

More than ten million Americans attended memorial services. At least forty schools were named for her. Her husband Steven became a founding director of Challenger Center, the education organisation established by June Scobee Rodgers, widow of the mission's commander, to teach science and engineering to children through simulated spaceflight; he has continued to serve on its advisory council. She was survived by two children.

The most exact memorial is institutional. NASA eventually created the Educator Astronaut Program, and Barbara Morgan — McAuliffe's backup, who had trained beside her in Houston — flew to orbit in 2007, twenty-one years late. Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger followed in 2010. The lesson from space was finally taught. It simply took a generation, and it was delivered by the person who had been standing next to her.

Achievements

• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Worked as astronaut and teacher