Were the crew of the Challenger ALIVE for the two-and-a-half minutes it took for the cabin to plunge into the ocean? By Tony Rennell Published: 07:20 BST, 8 June 2024 | Updated: 07:20 BST, 8 June 2024 e-mail View comments The supervisor of the Nasa support team seeing the crew into the Challenger space shuttle on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral had a very special present for one of the seven — a red apple for the most famous teacher in the world. Bubbly, auburn-haired, girl-next-door Christa McAuliffe, a smiley social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire , had been selected from some 11,000 applicants to be the first civilian in space — a stunt intended to revive flagging public interest in space exploration by making it seem accessible to ordinary people. The plan was for her to teach two 20-minute lessons from the shuttle, transmitted live to Earth from orbit.
One, titled The Ultimate Field Trip, would conclude with a five-minute Q&A with her class back in Concord. She would also conduct six science demonstrations recorded on video and distributed by Nasa to an audience of 18.5 million U.
S. schoolchildren. As a public relations exercise, the Teacher In Space Project was already a massive hit.
Some 800 journalists — twice as many as usual — had signed up to be at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch. The world was watching, just as excited as Christa at this new giant step for mankind. US space chuttle Challenger lifting off in January 1986 from.
