Pupils Asked for Flights of Fancy

NASA has an assignment for the nation’s schoolchildren--to name the new space shuttle that will replace Challenger, which was destroyed in a 1986 explosion. The agency, in cooperation with the Council of Chief State School Officers, invited teachers to enter their students in a national competition to name the orbiter, now being built and scheduled for its maiden flight in 1992. The idea of involving schoolchildren in naming a replacement orbiter was first put forward in a resolution by Rep. Tom Lewis (R-Fla.) less than two months after Challenger’s destruction. “The tradition of naming an orbiter after an exploratory or research sea vessel will be continued,” the NASA announcement said. The three remaining shuttles in the fleet are Discovery, Atlantis and Columbia. NASA said the name Challenger had been retired, in honor of the seven crew members, including New Hampshire schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, who were killed in the explosion. Information will be distributed soon to elementary and secondary teachers and principals and entry packets will be available in May.

--Douglas H. Ginsburg, who withdrew his name as a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court in November, 1987, when it became known that he had smoked marijuana, will join the faculty of the George Mason University School of Law as a visiting professor. Ginsburg, who will remain a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was one of four new law school professors appointed by the suburban Washington school. “I think (the marijuana disclosure) had nothing to do with his qualifications to sit on the Supreme Court or his ability to be a professor,” said Henry G. Manne, dean of the law school. Ginsburg will teach courses in antitrust law and business regulations and plans to continue teaching at Harvard.

--Britain’s Prince William, 5, and Prince Henry, 3, got a look at some of the more violent aspects of their family’s long history when they paid a visit to a wax museum. The children of Prince Charles and Princess Diana went on an hourlong tour of a converted warehouse known as the London Dungeon, accompanied by two detectives and a governess. They saw life-size models of Charles I, who was beheaded; King Henry VIII, who had two of his six wives beheaded; and Henry’s Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor, who burned her Protestant subjects at the stake. The boys, whose father is heir to the British throne, “seemed to enjoy their hour or so with us,” said the museum’s promotion manager, Peter Jay.