For the last several months, Rebeca Pereira and Rachel Wachman worked on a project honoring Christa McAuliffe’s life and legacy. Christa was a history teacher at Concord High School when she was chosen to ride aboard the Challenger space shuttle as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space program.
Her mission to teach live lessons from space was unfortunately an ill-fated one: 73 seconds after its launch in January of 1986, the Challenger exploded, killing its seven crew members.
Rather than dwell on what went wrong that day, they decided that as reporters for Christa’s hometown paper, it was their responsibility to continue playing a part in preserving her legacy.
Rebeca and Rachel spoke to more than three dozen sources and produced a special edition of the Monitor telling their stories. Rebeca visited NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to report on the organization’s Day of Remembrance for its fallen astronauts. Their walking tour of Concord was part of last week’s episode of the Monitor Weekly.
And to cap it all off, the Monitor hosted a panel with four very special guests at NHTI on Wednesday, January 28th — exactly 40 years after the Challenger disaster.
Joining us were Ricky Arnold, the educator astronaut who brought Christa’s lessons into space; Kris Coronis Jacques, one of Christa’s former students; Kathleen Young, the NHPBS documentarian who produced the short-film ‘Christa’; and Amber Woods, the archivist at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.
The Monitor is grateful for ConcordTV’s assistance with livestreaming our panel. It’s because of their help that we’re able to bring you this two-part special: the audio from our ‘Reach for the Stars’ panel, produced in collaboration with the Discovery Center.
To watch the panel in its entirety, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TabKiVKoa5U.