Christa McAuliffe’s lost lessons are finally getting taught in space.
Thirty-two years after the Challenger disaster, a pair of teachers turned astronauts will pay tribute to McAuliffe by carrying out her science classes on the International Space Station.
As NASA’s first designated teacher in space, McAuliffe was going to experiment with fluids and demonstrate Newton’s laws of motion for schoolchildren.
She never made it to orbit: She and six crewmates were killed during liftoff of space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986.
The Challenger disaster, witnessed on television by nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population at the time, occurred after the spaceship broke apart a bit more than a minute after takeoff.
Christa McAuliffe (pictured with family at left and with Barbara Morgan at right) was selected as the first teacher-in-space in for NASA. She was selected from more than 11,000 applicants for the program, which was designed to help stimulate student’s interest in STEM fields
McAuliffe was part of the Challenger’s seven-member passenger crew (left to right: McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Francis Scobee, Ronald McNair, Mike Smith and Ellison Onizuka). All seven died in the spaceship’s 1986 disaster
Astronauts Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold will perform some of McAuliffe’s lessons over the next several months. Acaba planned to share the news during a TV linkup Friday with students at her alma mater, Framingham State University near Boston.
Four lessons – on effervescence or bubbles, chromatography, liquids and Newton’s laws – will be filmed by Acaba and Arnold, then posted online by the Challenger Center, a not-for-profit organization supporting science, technology, engineering and math education.
The center’s president, Lance Bush, said he’s thrilled ‘to bring Christa’s lessons to life.’
‘We are honored to have the opportunity to complete Christa’s lessons and share them with students and teachers around the world,’ Bush said in a statement.
NASA’s associate administrator for education, Mike Kincaid, said the lessons are ‘an incredible way to honor and remember’ McAuliffe as well as the entire Challenger crew.
McAuliffe would have filmed part of her lessons in space and later would have educated children about her experience upon her return to Earth
Now, astronauts Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold will complete her lessons as she had intended them as a tribute to her. McAuliffe is pictured enjoying the experience of microgravity
Pictured is her grave, part of which reads: ‘America’s first ordinary citizen to venture toward space’
Four of the six lessons that McAuliffe planned to videotape during her space flight will be done. A few will be altered to take advantage of what’s available aboard the space station.
The lessons should be available online beginning this spring.
Acaba returns to Earth at the end of February. Arnold flies up in March. NASA is billing their back-to-back missions as ‘A Year of Education on Station.’
The two were teaching middle school math and science on opposite sides of the world – Acaba in Florida and Arnold in Romania – when NASA picked them as educator-astronauts in 2004. The idea to complete McAuliffe’s lesson plans came about last year.
‘As former teachers, Ricky and Joe wanted to honor Christa McAuliffe,’ said Challenger Center spokeswoman Lisa Vernal.
A thick cloud of engine exhaust, solid rocket booster plume and expanding gas fills the sky above Florida’s Kennedy Space Center after the explosion of the Challenger
McAuliffe taught history, law and economics at Concord High School in New Hampshire when she was selected for the position. Her alternate was Barbara Morgan
McAuliffe is pictured riding in a T-38 jet trainer over Galveston Bay, Texas
She is pictured talking to some of her former students a week before she began her training
McAuliffe was teaching history, law and economics at Concord High School in New Hampshire when she was selected as the primary candidate for NASA’s teacher in space project in 1985.
She was selected out of more than 11,000 applicants for the program, a service designed to spur interest in STEM education for children. McAuliffe, had she lived, would have educated children about her experience upon her return to Earth.
Her backup, Barbara Morgan, is on the Challenger Center’s board of directors.
Morgan was NASA’s first educator-astronaut, flying on shuttle Endeavour in 2007 and helping to build the space station.
Astronauts Scott Tingle, Joe Acaba and Norishige Kanai, on board the International Space Station, take questions from students at Framingham State University in Massachusetts