Welcome to our collection of quotes by Christa McAuliffe. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Christa McAuliffe
Sharon Christa McAuliffe (née Corrigan; September 2, 1948 – January 28, 1986) was an American teacher and astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire, who was killed on the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L where she was serving as a payload specialist.
She received her bachelor's degree in education and history from Framingham State College in 1970 and her master's degree in education, supervision and administration from Bowie State University in 1978. She took a teaching position as a social studies teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire in 1983.
In 1985, McAuliffe was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to the NASA Teacher in Space Project and was scheduled to become the first teacher to fly in space. As a member of mission STS-51-L, she was planning to conduct experiments and teach two lessons from Challenger. On January 28, 1986, the shuttle broke apart 1 minute 13 seconds after launch, resulting in the loss of all onboard. After her death, several schools were named in her honor, and she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 2004.
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 interest in history and space is a unique opportunity.
Imagine a history teacher making history.
I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries.
What are we doing here? We're reaching for the stars!
May your future be limited only by your dreams!
Reach for the stars.
Just as the pioneer travelers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals, I, as a pioneer space traveler, would do the same.
Space is for everybody. It's not just for a few people in science or math, or for a select group of astronauts. That's our new frontier out there, and it's everybody's business to know about space.
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 have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My sympathies have always been for working-class people.
When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?
Every shuttle mission's been successful.
It's not the Olympics. It's Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I'm part of.
If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.
Space is going to be commonplace.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I really don't want to say goodbye to any of you people.
I touch the future. I teach.
Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.
If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came.