Humanizing Space : McAuliffe’s Dream Dies in Fireball

Sharon Christa McAuliffe had said she hoped to “humanize the technology of the space age” for her students but approached her flight on the shuttle Challenger with a child’s sense of wonder.

“I still can’t believe they are actually going to let me go up in the shuttle,” the teacher from Concord, N.H., said in September as she pinned on her National Aeronautics and Space Administration identification badge.

Today, her flight ended moments after launch in a fireball which shattered the spacecraft.

McAuliffe was named in July as winner among 11,000 teachers who had applied to be the first educator in orbit.

‘Special Perspective’

“I want to demystify NASA and space flight,” she said during competition among the 10 teacher finalists in Houston. “I want students to see and understand the special perspective of space and relate it to them.”

Through all the training, her husband, Steven, a lawyer, and their children Scott, 9, and Caroline, 6, have remained behind in Concord. She said recently that Scott understood what she was doing, but that Caroline called occasionally to ask: “Mom, are you in space yet?”

McAuliffe, 37, taught elementary school in Bow, N.H., for nine years before joining Concord High School as a teacher in economics, history and law three years ago. She said in her application to NASA that she would like to record her trip to help “humanize the technology of the space age” through the observations of a non-astronaut.

“I think everybody who knows her, knows there may have been candidates of her equal, but none superior to her,” her husband told reporters after his wife’s selection was announced.

He said he believed that she was selected because she is “unpretentious and genuinely a nice person whom people really identify with.”