Remembering Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Disaster
I was a seven-year-old second grader when NASA sent the first American astronaut into space. The entire student body of Oyster River Elementary School gathered in the cafeteria to watch the launch on the screen of a single black-and-white television set, wheeled in on a cart for the occasion. That day, 200 children counted down in unison. When the space capsule broke away from the launch pad, we cheered and threw erasers into the air. For us, this was more than the first manned space launch. Where I came from—New Hampshire—a place where (it often seemed to me) a back-to-school shopping tr...
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