McAuliffe Left Imprint on Artist

When Robert Schaar, a Laguna Beach artist, was putting the finishing touches on a portrait of Sharon Christa McAuliffe for NASA last month, he decided as an afterthought to print her name on it, in case the first U.S. private citizen space traveler someday was forgotten.

“She sure will be part of history now, sadly enough,” Schaar said Tuesday after the schoolteacher-astronaut died in the space shuttle tragedy.

‘Doing It for Students’

Schaar, 53, who helps NASA chronicle the U.S. space program and specializes “in people,” said he met McAuliffe last September when she was beginning her space training in Houston. He said NASA gave him permission to follow her through her classes for four days, taking snapshots and making sketches that he later would use to try to capture her personality on canvas.

“My whole sense is that she was doing it (going into space) for the students,” Schaar said. McAuliffe concentrated hard on learning photography, he said, and kidded about how much she had to learn so she could show pictures to schoolchildren around the country, he said.

“Her students always came up in conversations,” Schaar said. “I’m sure her purpose was to get back to the children and talk about her experiences.”

Schaar said he remembers McAuliffe, 37, as “a cordial person” who “didn’t complain about me hanging around . . . She seemed to be handling the pressures very well. Her mind was completely on what she was doing.”

Because of her pleasant disposition, Schaar said, he portrayed her with a smile in his oil painting, which he said he sent to NASA for a collection of space program art that NASA has been developing for the last 20 years. His fee barely covered his costs, he said, because he does the work “for the love of it.”

Schaar said he struggled over what to put in the background of McAuliffe’s portrait, deciding finally to paint what he thought would be the most dramatic moment in her life: the space shuttle leaving Earth in a trail of smoke. “It would be the highlight of her life by all means,” he said.

Schaar said that Tuesday morning, like most all space mission mornings, he was watching the liftoff on television. He never thought of the risk. “It never entered my mind,” he said. “You kind of take these things for granted. . . . Maybe now that will change.”