Customer Reviews

Teacher in Space: Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Legacy

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While much has been written about the engineering and management decisions that lead up to Challenger explosion, the mission, the Challenger crew and the whole Teacher in Space Program have received much less attention. In this book, the author, Colin Burgess, only devotes a few pages to the accident and focuses primarily on the teacher in space program, Christa McAuliffe, her teaching and NASA experiences and of course the aftermath of the accident. Since the book was written well close to fifteen years after the accident, it avoids much of the sadness, anger and the like which dominated many of the early works on this subject. As a result, the author gives us a wonderful book about the life and times of Christa McAuliffe and the Teacher in Space Program. There is also closing chapter on the next Teacher in Space Candidate, Barbara Morgan, who should fly sometime this decade.

As someone who lives across the street from the Johnson Space Center (JSC), it is quite obvious to me that the author spent a considerable amount of time researching her life and experiences at JSC, since all of the places, buildings, etc., are named correctly (using the names in 1986), located in their proper places and the astronaut training she received is as it should be. In other words, not only are you getting a wonderful well written book, it is also well researched.

One final thing to add, the book contains 32 pages of color pictures and all royalties from the book go to the Christa McAuliffe Fund.

As a friend of Colin's, I normally would disqualify myself from reviewing one of his books but I feel that I had to comment on this book.

Colin has done a great job of cutting through the usual American sentimentality whenever the Challenger crew are mentioned and has done a great job in telling us about Christa. However, the book is not just about Christa. The ill fated Teacher in Space program is described in detail as is the launch and the short flight of the Challenger shuttle.

A worthy addition to any space library. Teenagers in particular will like this book.

Kate

This is not the first book written about Christa McAuliffe- but it may well be considered the last word on her. Many previous books have concentrated on the technical aspects of the Challenger explosion that took her life. Others were written about her as a person, but were written so close to the time of the disaster that it was hard for them to be objective and see her life and achievements in their entirety. With the passage of time, it has been possible to set the Teacher In Space Program and Christa's life in their true historical context, and Colin Burgess has here done an admirable job of doing so. The politically-inspired events that led to a teacher being offered a seat on a spacecraft formerly reserved for those with piloting or science tasks to undertake are outlined by Burgess with objectivity and clarity. But what comes through more than anything from this book is the remarkable strength of personality that McAuliffe had, making her the perfect person for a space flight, and how that strength has meant that, even after her death, her plans for space education have gone ahead. It seems that her mission to educate and inspire people to dream about spaceflight and act on those dreams was fulfilled even though she never made it into space. Burgess, having already authored an important body of spaceflight books, has added a work guaranteed to inspire and motivate anyone.

I've read several books on Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger tragedy and bought this book because the reviews described it as focusing on the Teacher in Space program. I am mostly interested in how the program came about, how it was announced and promoted, the application process, the selection process, and the training. The book certainly covers those areas but not in as much depth as I hoped. Much of the book is on the life of McAuliffe which is thoroughly covered in Robert T. Hohler's excellent biography "I Touch the Future..." While just over 100 pages with very wide margins, Burgess' work does offer information as well as a more comprehensive look into certain areas than I've found in other books which makes it definitely worthwhile to anyone interested in McAuliffe, Challenger, and the Teacher in Space program.

Burgess describes the lessons McAuliffe was planning to teach in space better than any book I've read so far. This information is found in the chapter "Learning the Ropes." One of the demonstrations involved a screwdriver to show that, in space, the weightless astronaut would turn instead of the screw unless anchored. As to the programs to send civilians into space, Burgess covers the incomplete plans of choosing a journalist to go into space (Walter Cronkite was one of the forty finalists) more thoroughly than elsewhere. While Hohler's book is a better source on the application and selection process of the Teacher in Space candidates, Burgess offers several color photos of the ten finalists I have not seen anywhere else.

Finally, with a publishing date of 2000, Burgess has the benefit of hindsight that most of the other books on Challenger do not have. He gives a brief update on Christa's husband and back-up Teacher-in-Space, Barbara Morgan. I had always thought programs to send civilians into space of any walks of life died with Challenger, but the Teacher in Space program has continued with Morgan taking the lead. She actually completed astronaut training in 1999 with an expectation that she would enter space as an "educator mission specialist." This book was completed before the Columbia disaster, so Burgess sounded very optimistic about her chances. Although delayed, fortunately, Morgan got the chance to live her dream on the space shuttle Endeavour. The book includes a section of color photos, an interesting chapter on "Space Objects Named for the Seven Challenger Astronauts," and a foreword by Christa's mother Grace Corrigan.