Christa McAuliffe

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Christa McAuliffe
Christa McAuliffe
Country: United States
Organization: NASA
selected on July 19, 1985
Start of the
first space flight: 		January 28, 1986
retired on January 28, 1986 (accident)
Space flights

Christa McAuliffe (* 2 September 1948 in Boston , Massachusetts as Sharon Christa Corrigan , † 28 January 1986 in Cape Canaveral , Florida ) was an American teacher who as a payload specialist on the space shuttle -Flight -51-L STS participated and was killed in the process.

Life

McAuliffe was Edward and Grace Corrigan's oldest child. She studied at Framingham State College in Framingham, Massachusetts, and received a bachelor's degree in 1970 . In the same year she married her childhood friend Steven McAuliffe and moved with him to Washington, DC They had a son in 1976 and a daughter in 1979. In Maryland she worked as a teacher from 1970: first a year as a temporary worker at the Benjamine Foulois Junior High School in Morningside, then at the Thomas Johnson Junior High School in Lanham American history and English.

In 1978, McAuliffe earned a Masters in Education from Bowie State College . The family moved to Concord , New Hampshire , where McAuliffe taught history in high school. She was fascinated by the American pioneers and introduced a course on the history of American women at her school.

She fought the poor state of public education in the United States and was President of the New Hampshire Teachers' Union. When she found out about NASA's Teacher-in-Space program, she applied. In her application she wrote: “As a woman, I was always jealous of men who could take part in the space program. I found that women were actually excluded from one of the most exciting professional fields there is. This opportunity to combine my skills as an educator with my interests in history and space travel is a unique opportunity to make my earlier dreams come true. I was there at the birth of the Space Age, and I want to be a part of it. ”She hoped that her participation would spark public interest in the situation in US education.

On July 19, 1985, McAuliffe was selected from around 11,000 candidates as part of the Teacher-in-Space ("Teachers in Space") program as a member of the shuttle crew. Her official title was Payload Specialist. For the flight, it was planned that she would hold two half-hour lessons on television from space: “The Ultimate Excursion” and “Why We Americans Explore Space”.

Although McAuliffe never reached Earth orbit, she is considered by many to be the premier teacher in space travel. The asteroid (3352) discovered in 1981 was named McAuliffe in her memory , as was a lunar crater . At times, before the Magellan mission, there was also a crater on the planet Venus named after her based on Soviet Venera data. In the space adventure game series Wing Commander , McAuliffe was recognized by giving a space sector its name.

McAuliffe's surrogate wife Barbara Morgan became a professional astronaut and flew to the International Space Station on the STS-118 space shuttle mission in August 2007 .

Private

McAuliffe was married to a lawyer. With her husband Steve, she had a son and a daughter. The mother, Grace Corrigan, née George, is descended on her father's side from Maronite- Christian immigrants from Lebanon . The historian and orientalist Philip Hitti was a great-uncle of McAuliffe.

See also

Web links

Commons : Christa McAuliffe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chapter 8: What's in a Name? in JPL 's Magellan's Venus Explorer Guide , accessed November 11, 2018
  2. ↑ Biography of Christa McAuliffe , McAuliffe Middle School
personal data
SURNAME McAuliffe, Christa
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Corrigan, Sharon Christa (maiden name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION American teacher and astronaut
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1986
Place of death Cape Canaveral , Florida