A biography for Christa McAuliffehasn’t been written yet.
“Every shuttle mission's been successful.”
“We sat around one night and thought that people are going to look back and say, I can't imagine there was a lot of excitement about HER going up!”
“If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came.”
“Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.”
“The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.”
“NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.”
“Reach for the stars.”
“I touch the future. I teach.”
“We haven't sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, Now you realize that there's X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen.”
“When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?”
“Space is going to be commonplace.”
“I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.”
“If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.”
“My sympathies have always been for working-class people.”
“I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.”
“Sometimes when things get kind of frantic, it helps to call my husband Steve, because I think he's got a real good sense of where everything's gonna be in a few years.”
“I will go around the space shuttle and give a guided tour of the major areas and describe what is done in each area. This will be called The Ultimate Field Trip.”
“I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.”
“I will have a one-hour program called the Mission Watch, where I will describe details of the mission and give additional information about the lessons from space.”
“If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what's going on up there in the space program, then my job's been done.”