Christa McAuliffe

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

Every shuttle mission’s been successful.

Reach for the stars.

The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.

If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what’s going on up there in the space program, then my job’s been done.

I really don’t want to say goodbye to any of you people.

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.

If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.

It’s not the Olympics. It’s Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I’m part of.

I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.

My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.

I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.

I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

Space is going to be commonplace.

The Twilight Zone’ wasn’t around with the kids. They think going up in space is neat. Within their lifetime, there will be paying passengers on the shuttle.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

I touch the future. I teach.

We sat around one night and thought that people are going to look back and say, I can’t imagine there was a lot of excitement about HER going up!

I will go around the space shuttle and give a guided tour of the major areas and describe what is done in each area. This will be called The Ultimate Field Trip.

I was a little concerned with how the crew was going to view me because I didn’t know whether this program had been kinda forced down their throats. But they were wonderful.

I will have a one-hour program called the Mission Watch, where I will describe details of the mission and give additional information about the lessons from space.

Sometimes when things get kind of frantic, it helps to call my husband Steve, because I think he’s got a real good sense of where everything’s gonna be in a few years.

When I’m 60, maybe, I’ll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.

Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.