Christa McAuliffe 1948-1986

She was riding in a Volkswagen with her future husband Steven through a rainstorm in Pennsylvania in 1969 when the news came over the car radio: a man had set foot on the moon. They both cheered, but neither had any reason to suspect that the event would someday directly change their lives. Much later she said, “When I was young, women did not fly in space.”

Neither did teachers. No one could have foreseen the final six months of her 37 years. Sharon Christa Corrigan McAuliffe was a wife, a mother of two small children and a dedicated high school teacher in Concord, N.H., when NASA announced last July that she had been chosen to join a shuttle crew. She was amazed that her application had brought her the top prize, and she was not the only one. A school official in Concord recalled, “To us, she seemed average. But she turned out to be remarkable. She handled success so beautifully.”

Though she soon found herself sitting next to the President at a White House dinner and appearing on TV news and talk shows, McAuliffe was in fact a startlingly normal American. The eldest of five children of an accountant in Framingham, Mass., she attended a local Roman Catholic high school, earned middling grades, sang in the glee club, played volleyball and softball, and met Steven. They were married after they were graduated from Framingham State College in 1970. Christa and her husband went first to Washington, where Steven received a law degree from Georgetown University, and later to New Hampshire, where he joined the staff of the state attorney general.

Her energy was prodigious. While her husband was in law school, she picked up a master’s degree in education from Bowie State College in Maryland. Expecting her first child, she started to keep a diary in a spiral notebook, recording doctor’s appointments, visitors, the deeds of the family cats. “This was my history for my children,” she said. “I would have loved to know my mother’s life that way.” She threw herself into community work, leading a Girl Scout troop, working in day-care units and raising money for the local hospital. Teaching full time, she won a reputation as an innovator, devising new courses on practical aspects of the law and on American women. Life inside Room 305 at Concord High was never dull. “In her classroom there was always something going on,” said Principal Charles Foley. “There were always plans.”

McAuliffe’s approach to feminism accentuated the positive. “She never sounded angry,” said a fellow teacher. “She wanted women to do more, to learn more.” She wanted everyone to learn more, including herself. “What are we doing here? We’re reaching for the stars,” she said after entering the astronaut program. Despite her newfound celebrity, McAuliffe never doubted that following her sojourn in space she would return to Concord, to the family she would have been away from for many months and, above all, to her classroom. She told an audience last August, “I touch the future. I teach.”