It started as a conversation, or rather, many conversations bleeding into each other in the weeks and months after their worlds shifted irrevocably.
Every person aboard the shuttle Challenger was someone’s parent, someone’s spouse, someone’s child, someone’s friend. Their absence left tremendous, unthinkable voids. And in the sudden public tragedy of their deaths, their loved ones worried that the crew — a vibrant group of seven people with a myriad of passions and backgrounds — would be remembered only for how they died.
They set out to keep their memory alive by preserving the strongest link uniting the Challenger Seven: a deep, abiding passion for exploring outer space.
“I knew that NASA would continue the space mission, but I wondered who would create their mission, their Teacher in Space mission,” said June Scobee Rodgers, wife of Challenger Commander Francis Richard “Dick” Scobee.
If all had gone according to plan, Christa McAuliffe would have taught several lessons broadcast from space and shared her experiences with classrooms across the world. Following the flight, she was slated to tour the country, visiting as many schools and students as her schedule allowed.
In discussing how to honor the Challenger crew beyond statues, monuments and plaques, their families decided to create a “living legacy,” Scobee Rodgers said, one that would bring space to the students who had been eagerly anticipating Christa doing the same.
“We all agreed, yes, let kids fly their mission. So, Christa’s Teacher in Space mission would be continued with the children flying. Dick Scobee’s flight as commander of that mission will continue. Their mission will continue, and we all agreed we don’t have to have their names out front. To just let it belong to a classroom of students. It’s their mission,” Scobee Rodgers said.
The children wouldn’t be flying in shuttles like Challenger. Rather, they’d be recreating the plan for that mission and ones similar to it to experience firsthand the thrill of teamwork in unexplored frontiers through an outer space simulator.
Scobee Rodgers and the other Challenger families banded together to create a nonprofit organization dedicated to science education. Thus, the Challenger Center was born in April of 1986, mere months after the space shuttle tragedy occurred on live television.
It was an effort at healing, not only for the families but for all the students and educators who had been tuned in that day.
“A lot of sweat and tears went into those equipment designs, but it doesn’t come alive until the students are flying their mission and you can hear them,” Scobee Rodgers said. “You can hear the excitement in their voices, where they’re shouting, and someone in Mission Control is responding to someone in the space station.”
The organization opened its first Challenger Learning Center in 1988 at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Texas. In the time since, they’ve grown their numbers to 33 centers, including one in South Korea, with two more opening in the U.S. this year.
Their mission simulations now take students to the Moon, Mars, the International Space Station and beyond, giving students a taste of the cosmos and the intricacies of exploration.
Holly Merrow, one of McAuliffe’s former students who herself became a teacher in Belfast, Maine, visited the Challenger Learning Center in Bangor last year. What she saw blew her away.
“All I could think is, ‘Christa would love this. This is what she would’ve wanted.’ And I wonder if all of this would have happened if she had lived,” Merrow said.
At Christa’s alma mater, Framingham State University, the integrated science learning center bears her name. Inside it resides a Challenger Learning Center, which opened in 1994. For the past three decades, this interactive educational space has brought Christa’s values to life for students in her hometown, who visit on field trips through school or organizations like Girl Scouts.
From 1994 to 2013, one of her college friends, Mary Liscombe, oversaw the program as director of the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science Learning, incidentally housed at the site of the former cafeteria where Liscombe and McAuliffe became friends decades prior.
Every chance she got, Liscombe talked about Christa with the students who came into the center. She’d ask them to turn to the classmates on either side of them and guess what they’d do in the future. When they’d say, “I don’t know,” she’d reply with, “Well, I sat next to somebody right here in this area before it was McAuliffe Center, and I really couldn’t have figured out what she would do. What she did do, do you know what that might have been?”
Christa’s mother, Grace Corrigan, lived nearby and used to come to the center regularly to meet students and educators. Liscombe recalled how special it was to see Corrigan talk about her daughter’s mission with younger generations.
Beyond those meaningful interactions, her favorite part of the job was watching students unlock their inner potential by taking on leadership roles in their teams, using creative problem-solving and gaining exposure to a different side of science learning.
“Even more important than saying ‘mission accomplished,’ at that age, they were empowered,” she said.
Alix Ayoub, a current Framingham State senior who works at the McAuliffe Center facilitating mission simulations, shared how her sixth-grade trip to the center changed her entire trajectory.
“Being specifically in this space, it was a field trip of my dreams, like it was my favorite field trip I’ve ever had,” said Ayoub, who focused her college application essay on the experience. “I think what I wrote was that it changed my view on science, because I didn’t love science, but this showed me that science could be fun and interactive instead of memorizing stuff.”
Like Christa, Ayoub wants to become a teacher. She finds a poetic parallelism in studying at Christa’s former university and following in her footsteps. For Ayoub, Christa’s legacy is one of making learning accessible. She tries to share this with the students who come into the center as much as she can.
“I tell them about her, and I tell them about how she taught and how she wanted to be able to teach other kids from what she learned by going to space,” Ayoub said.
Current McAuliffe Center Director Dr. Irene Porro is working on adapting the missions to as many age ranges as possible. With a background in astrophysics, she studied at MIT, where there is a building named after Challenger Mission Specialist Ronald McNair.
She aims to bring interactive science education to as many students in the Framingham community as possible.
“40 years later, at least for me, it’s reaching out to as many young people as possible, giving them this experience,” Porro said. “You know, Christa was not a science teacher, something I have to remind people. To me, that’s important, because it shows you don’t need to be a scientist to be part of this experience, to be part of this effort.”
The number of Challenger Learning Centers continues to grow. Scobee Rodgers, a former educator herself, finds power in the interactivity of the missions.
Historically, she said, lessons are typically taught on paper, through books and displays. The Challenger Learning Centers, in addition to being that “living legacy” the families discussed four decades ago, offer something different, something enriching in new, innovative ways.
“If a child can apply the lessons in a real-world experience, then they never forget how they applied that lesson,” she said. “And if it has a space theme, that’s even better, because in the future, we need to focus on our flights and space and benefit our country and the planet.”
