30 years since Challenger, teacher-in-space finalists gather

“The day after was a blur”, said Penn-Goetsch, “I was talking to a lot of media, and seeing that footage over and over and over again, it was hard”. He loved planes and wanted to be an astronaut, and he remembers sitting with the other children in his class to watch the launch.

The U.S. Air Force also honored the Challenger crewmembers.

Most of the teachers who were at Concord High School when McAuliffe taught have since retired, but they said she will always be a presence at the school.

The families of those lost gathered Thursday with NASA to mark the anniversary.

Rollin says every year on this day, staff and student take time out to honor McAuliffe in the school named after her.

But it was Christa’s story that enthralled the nation and had so many people glued to their TV’s the morning of the launch.

The museum won’t just be remembering the Challenger today. “We were just such a small community”.

Perhaps so, but President Ronald Reagan came as close as anyone to making sense of it all.

After extensive investigation it was determined that a design flaw combined with cold weather to lead to the disaster. The crash sent shockwaves through the organisation, causing it to suspend all further space shuttle flights for the next two years, while forensics experts investigated the reason for the accident. He had flown on three shuttle missions and was mission commander on the Challenger’s previous mission. “The important thing afterwards was to learn from the experience for everybody and to try to make sure that it didn’t happen again”, he said.

FILE – In this series of January 28, 1986 photos, the space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

But in more recent years, Jerome said private space flight companies, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, have been able to relieve NASA of that burden.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield added his voice to those paying tribute to the Challenger crew.

“The disaster really highlighted concerns engineers had been raising about the shuttle design”, said Jonathan Jerome, a science communicator at Science North.