1950-1986
Teacher, Astronaut

A Representative Teacher: A Woman, A Mother.

Christa McAuliffe, a thirty-seven-year-old social-studies teacher at Concord (New Hampshire) High School was chosen from eleven thousand candidates to be a pioneer: the nation's first ordinary citizen in space. Her life ended when the space shuttle Challenger exploded ninety seconds after liftoff in February 1986. McAuliffe left her mark on the decade and on the nation as a model teacher, a woman who combined the idealism of the 1960s and the feminist ideas of the 1970s and 1980s.

Background.

All of the important decisions of her life, her friends said, were as a result of her essentially solid values. She attended a Roman Catholic college- preparatory school in Framingham, Massachusetts, her hometown, with a solid academic reputation and a strict code of behavior. She decided before graduation that her life's work would be teaching, to her mind...