Christian singer joins tribute 30 years after Challenger disaster

News sources also recorded the reactions of spectators watching the launch and subsequent disaster on-site – including McAuliffe’s parents, which were also circulated at the time.

“People who really cared, people who believed in them wanted to continue that mission”, said Challenger Center founder June Scobee Rodgers, who was married to shuttle Commander Dick Scobee.

Christa McAuliffe Community Middle School in Palm Beach County, named after the teacher on the spacecraft, will hold a ceremony Thursday morning. Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire, had been selected to become the first member of NASA’s citizen-in-space program. The McAuliffes normally do not take part in these NASA memorials, so Scott’s presence was especially noteworthy. Thirty years ago Thursday, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds into its flight.

But McAuliffe’s death, as well as the loss of crew members Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik and Gregory B. Jarvis, shocked the nation, which at the time had come to see shuttle launches as all but routine.

It honored the seven challenger crew members who died when the shuttle blew up in the sky during launch on January 28th, 1986.

Since the disaster, Wheeling Jesuit University was able to open their Challenger Learning Center, to gives kids in our area a hands on lesson on some of the things astronauts might experience, when they go through training. “Our thoughts and memories of Christa will always be fresh and comforting”.

“It’s not often that a teacher is at a loss for words, I know my students wouldn’t think so”, she said in July 1985, months before Challenger took off. And that was the dream Christa McAuliffe made her reality; a role model to these students lost too soon.

NASA has posted an excellent page of Challenger resources, ranging from mission voice transcripts and crew biographies to the text of the Rogers Commission report and other critical post-flight analyses. Unusually cold weather that morning left Challenger’s booster rockets with stiff O-ring seals; a leak in the right booster doomed the ship. All seven people on board died.