Sharon Christa Corrigan McAuliffe graduated from Framingham State College in 1970 with degrees in education and history. She continued her education by earning a Master’s of Education at Bowie State University, completing the degree in 1978. In 1982, the wife and mother of two began teaching American history, law, and economics at Concord, NH.
In 1984, President Ronald Regan announced the Teacher in Space project with the intention of sending an ordinary person into space, and in 1985, Christa McAuliffe was selected out of 11,000 applicants to be that person. Her mission aboard the space shuttle Challenger was to perform two fifteen minute classes from space and conduct basic scientific experiments, all of which would be broadcast to millions of schoolchildren. Challenger, however, seemed doomed from the start. On the morning of January 28th, it was unusually cold, eliciting concern from both NASA and the engineers at Thiokol, but additional delays were deemed unacceptable. Thus, Challenger launched that fateful morning at 9:27 AM, with the temperature at the coldest permitted for a launch: 31° Fahrenheit. Just seventy-three seconds after lift-off, Challenger broke apart, killing all seven astronauts on board. McAuliffe has been memorialized in many venues, including numerous tributes on and around the Framingham campus. The Christa McAuliffe Center was established on the Framingham State campus as a resource to aid educators in the community and to strengthen community support for public education. FSU is also home to the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe archival collection, housed in the Archives and Special Collections of Whittemore Library. The collection was donated by Grace Corrigan, Christa’s mother and an FSU alumnae. McAuliffe is also the namesake of the McAuliffe branch of Framingham public library system. Her hometown of Concord, NH, where she taught until her death, established the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, a planetarium and observatory for young students. She and the rest of the Challenger crew are memorialized together by a monument at Arlington National Cemetery.