Selection, Evaluation, and the Fixing of Public Memory

Sarah Bagby: can tell you exactly where I was. Mrs. Troester's fourth grade classroom. The television had been wheeled in on one of those tall metal carts, the kind with the chunky wheels that squeak on the linoleum. The neighboring class had come to our room and they took the floor while we sat at our desks. We all knew what was coming. We'd been talking about it for days. A teacher was going to space. and our teacher was letting us watch. That felt important in a way that's hard to put into words when you're 10 years old. Like this was our moment too. Like she was ours. I can still see the screen. I can still feel the stillness of the room when the image changed. And I can still feel the silence that followed. Not the quiet of people listening. the quiet of people who don't understand what they've just seen and are looking at the adults in the room and finding that the adults also don't have an answer. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that silence, about what we lost and about what most of us were never told came next. My name is Sarah Bagby. This is episode two of The Mission Continues. On July 19th, 1985, Vice President George H.W. Bush stepped to a microphone in the Roosevelt Room at the White House alongside NASA Administrator James Beggs. There were cameras. There were reporters. There were the 10 teacher and space finalists who had been through weeks of medical evaluations and interviews and had spent enough time together to have formed genuine friendships by this point. And then Bush said the name. Christa McAuliffe. Social studies teacher, Concord High School, Concord, New Hampshire. 36 years old, mother of two. Her backup would be Barbara Morgan, a second grade teacher from McCall, Idaho. The room erupted. McAuliffe, by every account from that day, was genuinely surprised. She had not assumed she would win. She showed up, she was herself, and the panel had chosen her for exactly that reason. Within hours, she was on the phone with her students back in Concord. Within days, she was doing national television. Within weeks, she had been on the Today Show, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where she delivered what would become the most quoted line of her public life. Carson asked about the mission. She smiled and said, if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat, just get on. That line tells you almost everything you need to know about Christa McAuliffe was. Not performing, not scripted, just herself. meanwhile, Morgan went home to McCall. And here's the thing about the word backup. Backup sounds procedural, neutral, like a contingency. It doesn't capture what it actually means to be the person who had also been through the same rigorous selection process, who would also complete the same training. who would be at the launch pad on launch day, but whose name didn't make the front page. Howard McCurdy has written about how American spaceflight consistently transforms complex systems into human stories, and in doing so, turns some people into symbols and others into supporting characters. The Teacher in Space program, almost from the moment McAuliffe's name was read aloud, organized itself around a single symbolic figure. And That had consequences, not for how the program was understood at the time, but for how it would be remembered. The making of Christa McAuliffe as a national figure was not accidental. It was the result of deliberate choices by NASA's Public Affairs Office and by the White House Communications Team and the press corps that understood immediately what kind of story it had. It was a teacher story. And teacher stories work because everyone has had one. Every person listening to this podcast right now can think of a teacher who changed something for them, who said the right thing at the right who made a subject suddenly make sense, who told you that you were capable of something you didn't yet believe. That's a universal experience. And when the media covered McAuliffe they understood instinctively how to use it. The coverage emphasized the ordinary details. The classroom, in Concord. Her two kids, Scott and Caroline. Nine and six, her husband Steve. The house, the fact that she had coached cheerleading. The fact that her students called her Mrs. McAuliffe, These details weren't incidental. They were the story. Because what NASA and the White House had understood and what the press amplified was that putting a teacher in space wasn't really about the teacher. It was about the classroom, about the students on Earth who would watch their teacher teaching from orbit and think, if she could do that, what can I do? She was funny too, and that comes through in everything. The crew members' accounts, her public appearances, her mother, Grace George Corrigan's memoir. Grace Corrigan later wrote a book called A Journal for Christa that describes watching her daughter become a national figure in a matter of weeks. She writes about pride and fear existing at the time, the way a parent can be thrilled for a child and terrified for them simultaneously. And she writes about Christa telling her repeatedly, mom, we're going to be fine. We're going to be fine. That detail has stayed with me because McAuliffe wasn't performing confidence. She believed it. She genuinely thought is worth doing. It's going to go well and it's going to matter. She was right about the matter. She was tragically wrong about it all going well. Training was serious. McAuliffe relocated to Houston. She and Morgan were integrated in the STS-51L crew. Commander Dick Scobee pilot Mike Smith, mission specialists Judy Resnick, El Onizuka, and Ron McNair, and payload specialist Greg Jarvis. A remarkable group. Resnick was only the second American woman to fly in space. McNair had a doctorate from MIT. Onizuka was the first Asian-American to fly in space. And then the two teachers. Some career astronauts had real reservations about the payload specialist program. Mulane has documented it plainly. A shuttle seat wasn't a ceremonial prize. It was a critical operational position. Putting someone in that seat who hadn't been through full astronaut training felt to some in the Corps like a risk. Not a personal objection to McAuliffe, a professional one. to the concept. But McAuliffe and Morgan trained seriously and competently. They weren't guests to be managed, they were crew members with a job to do. And by 1985, the ⁓ was almost ready to begin. Schools were already planning viewing parties, teachers were writing lesson plans around the broadcast, students were counting down. The country had been invited, specifically, deliberately. watch this launch and millions of children were going to be watching from the classrooms in the company of their teachers because a teacher was on board. Nobody watching knew what was about to happen. The launch had been delayed several times before January 28th, 1986 finally arrived. Weather, technical issues, schedule slippage, each delay pushed the anticipation higher. Schools that had already rearranged schedules had to rearrange them again. The morning of the 28th was cold at Cape Canaveral, unusually cold for Florida. There were icicles on the launch structure, engineers at Morton Thiokol the company that manufactured the solid rocket boosters, has spent the previous night in a tense internal argument about whether it was safe to launch in such temperatures. They were worried about the O-ring seals in the booster joints, rubber gaskets that had shown troubled behavior in previous cold weather tests. The engineers recommended against launching. Their management overruled them. NASA managers, under pressure from a schedule that had already slipped multiple times, approved the launch. The crew boarded. The countdown proceeded. classrooms across the country, televisions had been wheeled in on those tall carts. Teachers had interrupted their regular schedules. Students sat facing screens, watching the ⁓ clock, Waiting for the moment their teacher's teacher would leave the earth. Challenger launched at 1138 in the morning Eastern time. For the first seconds, it looked normal, bright, loud, the engines burning against a cold blue sky. 73 seconds after liftoff, the Challenger disintegrated. It didn't look like the explosion you'd expect. The external tank ruptured and the propellant ignited in a fireball, but the orbiter itself was briefly intact. What the cameras caught was a white cloud, a bright flash, and two solid rocket boosters flying free in long arcing trails against the blue sky. It looked confusing. That's the word people used most often. Confusing. Like something had gone wrong with the effects. The broadcasters faltered. They described what they were seeing, but their voices had a particular quality of people talking because silence is worse. In the classrooms, the children's looked at the adults. The adults didn't know what to tell them. All seven crew members were lost. Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Judy Resnick, El Onizuka, Ron McNair, Greg Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. Seven people who had waved at the cameras that morning. Seven people whose families were watching the same screen as the rest of the country. Barbara Morgan was watching from a NASA facility. She had been following the countdown all morning and she watched it end. What happened in the hours and days after Challenger is in some ways as important to the story as the 73 seconds themselves. Because what happened was the fixing of memory. By fixing, I don't mean repairing. I mean locking into place, setting like concrete. Every major news network covered the disaster continuously for days. The images were replayed hundreds of times. The image of McAuliffe's parents in the viewing stands, their faces moving from pride to confusion to horror, was replayed until it became iconic. That evening, President Reagan addressed the nation from the Oval Office. He had been scheduled to deliver the State of the Union. He postponed it. Instead, he spoke about the crew and ended with lines from a poem by World War II pilot John Gillespie McGee, who died in 1941. We will never forget them, he said, nor the last time we saw them, this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. Those words became inseparable from the disaster. They elevated the crew into something and through repetition, images replayed, the same language appearing over and over. The Teacher in Space program collapsed in public memory into one name. Christa McAuliffe became synonymous with Teacher in Space. Time Magazine called it a national wound. Newsweek referred to McAuliffe as America's teacher. A possessive framing that told you everything about how the public had come to think of her. Not a specific woman from a specific place. The representative of something universal and now lost. Here's the thing about how collective memory works. Catastrophic events overwhelm the narrative space around them. Everything before becomes prologue. Everything after becomes aftermath. The event itself becomes the story. And the story in the public telling became this. NASA tried to put a teacher in space. The shuttle exploded. The teacher died. The program was over. Two of those four sentences are true. The last one isn't. While the coverage was happening, the memorials, congressional hearings, the Rogers Commission investigation, things were also happening that the cameras didn't follow. The network of the 113 space ambassadors was still there, scattered across the country in their classrooms, still doing the educational outreach work they'd been charged with, invisible, uncovered, still going. The families of the Challenger crew were building something. June Scobee Rogers, the widow of Commander Dick Scobee, later described, the determination among the families to create something living from their loss. Not a monument, but a place where the mission could continue. What they built was the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, a network of simulation-based learning centers where students work in teams to solve real problems using real science in settings that feel like space missions. They didn't build a memorial. They built a launch pad. Barbara Morgan went home to McCall, Idaho, where she kept teaching, where she kept quietly connected to NASA, and where she continued to year after year a designation that technically still existed, even though the mission it was built around had no flight date on the calendar. What she did next is the story of the final episode. But I want to leave you with this. Absence of coverage is not the same as absence of Things that don't generate headlines are still real. People who keep showing up every day in a small Idaho town are still doing something that matters, even if no one's writing about it. The cameras moved on, the mission didn't. Here's something that almost never appears in accounts of the Teacher in Space program. the 113 other finalists. Those were the semifinalists, the teachers who had traveled to Washington in June of 1985 and spent a week together before the field was narrowed to 10 finalists. Before they went home, NASA gave them a new title and a new mission. They were designated NASA Space Ambassadors. They were given materials, curricula, and a charge. To go back to your classrooms, your districts, your states, talk about the space program. your students to what we're doing. Keep this conversation going. NASA had come looking for one teacher to put into a rocket. It left Washington with a national education network. Those 113 teachers went back to their schools in all 50 states and created ripples that spread far beyond what any single flight could have produced. They talked to students who had never thought about space. They ran classroom activities tied to the Teacher in Space program. They were, in the truest sense, educators carrying a mission forward, not with a rocket, but with a lesson plan. After January 28, 1986, most of those teachers kept going. They didn't stop teaching. They didn't abandon the space education work they had been asked to do. They absorbed the grief because they were teachers. and teachers absorb things and keep going. And they kept showing up. Morgan has said to this day, many of those original space ambassadors remain connected with one another. She's heard from them over the years, retired teachers who still carry something forward from that week in Washington four decades ago. Those who are still active in their communities, they're still doing the work. The cameras never followed any of them. But there they were. There they're still. And that matters because it tells you something about what education missions actually look like when they succeed. Not a single dramatic moment. A thousand quiet ones. Next time on The Mission Continues, the cameras leave, the flowers fade, and one teacher back in a classroom in McCall, Idaho makes a decision that the rest of the country won't notice for 21 more years. I'm Sarah Bagby. Thanks for listening.