On the last Wednesday of July 1985, Johnny Carson swept aside the multicolored curtains behind the stage in Burbank and strode out to begin his opening monologue. Silver-haired and dapper in a blue blazer and tie, he was in his twenty-third year of presenting The Tonight Show; his ad-libs were swift, his material as wry and effortless as ever. “There’s nothing earth-shattering in the papers today,” he said, before skipping through a handful of topical riffs: an invasion of killer bees in California, Michael Jackson and his single sequined glove, the half centenary of Porky Pig, and the success of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood Part II. There was even a Rambo action figure, he said, equipped with a bow and arrow and a machine gun, for kids. “Interesting doll,” Carson deadpanned. “You wind it up, and it breaks into Ken and Barbie’s room looking for communists.”
With the commercial break out of the way, Carson announced the evening’s lineup. “My first guest tonight, I’m sure you have read about or heard about—she has about a three-page article in this week’s People magazine. She’s a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire,” he said to scattered applause and cheers, “and she was recently selected by NASA from a field of over eleven thousand applicants to be the first—as they call it—average citizen in space.”
Backstage, Christa McAuliffe patted her hair and straightened the skirt of her sensible white suit, and a few minutes later stepped out to kiss Carson on the cheek. At thirty-six, McAuliffe had been teaching for fifteen years, and projected poise and confidence: she joked, and parried the host’s sardonic asides, and explained the outlines of what NASA called its Space Flight Participant Program; she regaled him with anecdotes about how she had been selected to make the experience of spaceflight more comprehensible to the public; she described her experience of overnight fame, and how it helped her continue to reach the students she had left behind; she told him what she expected of her mission: “It’s going to be six days, and every ninety minutes I’m going to be orbiting the Earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour,” she said with a giggle. “I really hope to get on the treadmill around California—and jog across the United States.”
Carson was clearly charmed.
“It sounds absolutely fascinating, and you seem to be handling it really well and I think they made a very good choice,” he told her. “Because I think you can communicate this to most of us who really can’t understand all of it. You’re excited to go, huh?”
“Oh, I really am,” McAuliffe said. “I can’t wait.”
Ordinary Americans had begun petitioning NASA to carry them into orbit from the moment Alan Shepard first left the atmosphere in 1961, and for the next twenty years the agency received thousands of letters every year from men and women anxious to become Everyman astronauts. But the Space Shuttle, with its explicit promise of making space travel routine, brought public requests to new heights. Proposals poured in from artists, real estate developers, poets, and policemen; from those who hoped the shuttle would take them closer to God, and women who wanted to deliver the first baby in space. Rockwell International, the contractor who built the orbiter, had even produced a blueprint for a version of the spacecraft that could carry seventy-four passengers.
By the time the initial test flights of the shuttle were taking place in 1981 and early 1982, more than ten thousand pieces of mail from would-be space travelers were arriving at NASA facilities every year. Behind the big green doors of his office on the seventh floor of the agency’s headquarters on Independence Avenue in Washington, DC, Administrator James Beggs hosted visits from organizations pressing to send the first citizen astronauts into space: for a while, Beggs considered choosing a photographer from National Geographic magazine, and was especially taken with the idea of selecting a suitable Boy Scout.
Yet Beggs soon concluded that a formal procedure would be necessary to handle the rising torrent of competing requests. In July 1982, just as the fourth and final test flight was completed and President Reagan declared the shuttle “operational,” NASA appointed a six-man Citizens in Space Task Force to examine the issue. The group, which included shuttle pilot Dick Truly and blockbuster novelist James Michener, set out to decide whether there was a valid argument for flying private citizens on the shuttle, and—if so—how they should be selected. To help it decide, the group spent a year meeting and touring NASA facilities around the United States. But it also solicited advice from more than two hundred leading figures in aerospace, business, and the arts, of whom more than half took the time to respond; their collected opinions covered a spectrum from the aridly unimaginative to the outright fanciful.
Former agency Administrator Robert Frosch suggested that members of the general public should be given the chance to become astronauts through buying tickets in a national lottery, while at the same time NASA could invite artists and performers to join the program in a separate category, through which traveling in space would inspire or inform “a creative act.” Writer Norman Mailer said that the selection process should address the public perception of the agency as a “private and intolerably starchy club.” Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that what the agency really needed was someone who could undermine the solemnity of space exploration by focusing on the absurdity of humanity’s place in the universe; Woody Allen, he wrote, would be ideal: “A good clown is what you need.”
Meanwhile, former Apollo astronaut Bill Anders, who had spent years lobbying for NASA on Capitol Hill, recommended choosing a candidate from among defense and aerospace executives, or members of Congress. Many other respondents opposed the idea of a lottery, not least because the random selection process it promised would open the agency to the risk of introducing “an unemployed, undereducated, ne’er-do-well” into the hallowed company of astronauts. One scientist at Johns Hopkins instead proposed inviting only the wealthiest members of society to become gentlemen space travelers, suggesting that NASA help create a network of exclusive “Shuttle Clubs”; modeled on the New York Yacht Club, these would solicit funds from the richest cliques in America to underwrite their own trips into orbit, “much,” he suggested, “as they succeeded in providing sailing ships to compete in the America’s Cup.”
The final report of the Citizens in Space Task Force reached James Beggs’s desk in July 1983, granting cautious approval to the idea of sending passengers into orbit aboard the shuttle. “Flight of private citizens,” they wrote, “is both feasible and desirable.” But they warned that there were clear risks: the group feared, for instance, that the public may see the project as “a self-serving public relations gimmick that trivializes the space program.” Every member of the task force also understood the dangers inherent in spaceflight: they knew that the odds of losing astronauts in an accident were significant. At one point they discussed how the agency’s image might suffer if a beloved figure like Walter Cronkite—the then sixty-six-year-old anchorman and dean of TV news, who had already put his name forward to fly—was killed aboard the shuttle. The group suggested that NASA start slowly.
By early the next year, the agency’s newly named Space Flight Participant Program was already under way. Staff had identified a total of thirteen impending shuttle flights that could carry a passenger, with scheduled launch dates stretching from August 1984 to October 1986. And while the press luxuriated in rumors that the first citizen in space would be a celebrity—bespectacled country star and spaceflight fanboy John Denver was a favorite—an internal committee concluded that the best candidates would be either teachers or journalists. They recommended to James Beggs that a teacher should go first, and the NASA chief agreed. “The biggest receptive audience we have in this country are the kids,” he said. “Kids love space. A teacher could give you an introduction to those kids that no one else could.”
In July 1984, Beggs sent the idea to the White House for approval, and President Reagan—grasping the popular appeal of the initiative in an election year—made it his own. In August, Reagan announced the program following a visit to a resource-starved junior high school in Washington, DC. “Today, I’m directing NASA to begin a search in all of our elementary and secondary schools and to choose as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program one of America’s finest—a teacher,” he said to polite applause. “When that shuttle lifts off, all of America will be reminded of the crucial role that teachers and education play in the life of our nation. I can’t think of a better lesson for our children and our country.”
Across town, in an auditorium at NASA headquarters, James Beggs watched on a giant video screen as the President concluded his remarks—and then launched a press conference dedicated to the details of the “Teacher in Space” program. Applications would open in November, he explained, and be due by the end of the year. NASA clerks would weed out those hopefuls who didn’t meet the basic qualifications, and forward the rest to the Council of Chief State School Officers, usually responsible for the Teacher of the Year awards, and who NASA had contracted to assist with sorting the mountain of applicants. The council’s committees in every US state or territory would each choose two candidates, contributing to a total of more than one hundred teachers, who would travel on to Washington, DC, for interviews with a national panel. The panel would choose ten finalists to be sent to Houston for a week of appraisals and testing before the winner—and his or her backup—was announced later in 1985. After their flight, the successful applicant would be required to spend a year meeting the public to discuss their experience. “We don’t expect them to keep it to themselves,” Beggs said. “They’d better be aware they’re going to be a hot property for us.”
That same day, Christa McAuliffe was driving through Concord with her husband, Steve, when they heard Reagan announce the program on the car radio. Christa said nothing, but felt a quiver of anticipation. She turned to her husband with a smile. “It’s a don’t-miss,” he said. “Go for it.”
The next morning, she picked up the Concord Monitor from the porch of the couple’s brown-shingled Victorian on Pine Ridge Drive and glanced at the headline on the front page: “Reagan Wants Teacher in Space.” Beside it was a photograph of Judy Resnik, climbing from the cockpit of her T-38 in Houston as she prepared for her mission aboard Discovery. McAuliffe had included Sally Ride as part of the course she taught her high school class on women’s history; now Resnik would be America’s second woman in space, with a teacher to follow; it seemed hard to believe. There may be hope yet, McAuliffe thought. But with the new school year a little more than a week away, there was a lot to do to prepare for it; losing herself in work, she quickly forgot all about the Teacher in Space program.
Meanwhile, citing his lack of spending on education, the nation’s largest teaching union dismissed the President’s announcement as an electioneering gimmick. “We don’t need to send one teacher into space,” the union president said. “We need to send all teachers into their classrooms fully equipped and ready to help students learn. Sending a teacher into outer space won’t solve the problems in schools on earth.” On Capitol Hill, former astronaut Senator John Glenn opposed the initiative as dangerous and frivolous.
Even so, many teachers across the country were galvanized by the prospect: at least 45,000 of them requested application forms, and some 11,500 applied. The entry requirements were so rudimentary that it seemed almost anyone could qualify—candidates needed to be US citizens, and to have five years’ teaching experience; but they were not subject to stringent health requirements, or even an age limit. “We’re not looking for Superman,” a NASA public affairs officer said. “We’re looking for the person who can do the best job of describing their experience on the shuttle to the most people on earth.”
It wasn’t until November that Christa McAuliffe thought again about the competition. The weekend before Thanksgiving 1984, she was attending a teachers’ conference at the Hilton hotel in Washington, DC, when she came across a table covered with copies of the initial application for the Teacher in Space program. When no one was looking, she filled a folder with a stack of them and, on her return to Concord High, handed them out among her friends—and then completed one herself. A week later, a blue-and-silver folder with an image of the shuttle on the cover arrived in the mail. The formal Teacher in Space application package was hefty and daunting: it included a twenty-five-page booklet, with eight separate essay questions to answer, as well as references and background information; it could take as long as 150 hours of work to complete. McAuliffe saw no point in kidding herself; the packet looked ten times worse than a term paper: she knew that if there was one thing she was going to put off until the last minute, this was it. And the final deadline for completed applications was still months away. She stuffed the package into a drawer.
Sharon Christa Corrigan was born in Boston in 1948, the first of five children in a family of Kennedy Democrats. In her early years, while her father was studying at Boston College, she slept in the single bedroom of a cold water flat in a Dorchester housing project, while her parents slept on the couch. In junior high, she sat with other students in the cafeteria to watch Alan Shepard’s Redstone rocket blast off from the Cape on television—but was more focused on piano lessons, and spending time with her family, than the developing space program. She met Steve McAuliffe at their small Catholic high school in Framingham, Massachusetts; he proposed soon after she turned sixteen—but they agreed not to get married until after college. Zealous but headstrong, Christa may not have been at the top of her class, but made the National Honor Society with a combination of hard work and infectious enthusiasm. In her junior year, she won a place in the annual Girl Scout Roundup competition, beating other applicants from all over the world. Enrolling at Framingham State College in 1966 to major in American history and secondary education, she maintained a long-distance relationship with Steve while he studied at Virginia Military Institute, and entered what she called her “radical period”: she wore her hair in a bleached Afro, went to see Jefferson Airplane play in Boston, protested against the war in Vietnam, and spoke out in support of rights for women and Black and Native Americans. But she also captained the debate team, made the dean’s list three times, and rarely missed a class.
She and Steve were driving through a rainstorm in Pennsylvania the night Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and they both cheered as they heard his voice crackle over the car radio, reporting his leap to the lunar surface. Afterward, when Pan Am announced the opening of reservations for the first commercial flight to the moon, she encouraged her fiancé to join her in signing up. The couple married in August 1970, eight weeks after graduation, and moved to Washington, DC.
McAuliffe began work as a substitute teacher, and then spent seven years teaching American history, English, and civics to the largely Black students of a junior high school in a lower-middle-class Maryland suburb, while Steve studied for the bar in DC. Christa earned a master’s in education supervision and administration, became a strong and outspoken advocate of change at the troubled school, and led a campaign for better union representation of teachers. Her husband encouraged her to become a lawyer, too—but she believed she could make a bigger difference in society in the classroom.
Their first child, Scott, was born in 1976; their second, Caroline, followed three years later. By that time the family had moved to Concord, the state capital of New Hampshire. Christa described it as “a Norman Rockwell kind of place”—a placid family town on the banks of the Merrimack River, surrounded by fields of corn and strawberries, where she eventually took a job at the local high school, a rambling redbrick building three blocks from home.
At Concord High, McAuliffe taught American history, law, and economics, establishing herself as a well-liked and inspirational teacher who took risks in the classroom. With two young children at home, she often arrived late, her hair still wet from the shower—but she kept her students engaged with role-playing and frequent field trips, and combined her feminist principles with an interest in the role of ordinary people in history in a course she titled “The American Woman.” If colleagues had any criticism of her, it was that she was overcommitted: she mentored students outside school hours, as well as leading a Girl Scout troop, volunteering at a family planning clinic, appearing in community theater, and raising funds for the hospital and the YMCA. And while McAuliffe was still working through her multiple to-do lists in the fall of 1984—she kept one copy on the fridge at home, another taped to the dashboard of her Volkswagen bus, and a third in her pocket—across the country other teachers had already begun vying for NASA’s ticket into space. Before applications were even open, a group of more than forty of them attended an event at Space Camp in Huntsville hosted by agency officials, where they donned astronaut flight suits and sat aboard a shuttle mock-up. Elsewhere, others approached the competition as a political campaign, taking to the streets and handing out buttons, or encouraging their students to petition the public on their behalf; in the meantime, thousands of students across the country wrote letters to NASA explaining why their teacher should be the one chosen to fly aboard the orbiter.
McAuliffe might have forgotten altogether about the contest without the prompting of her husband. Steve, by now a trial lawyer in private practice, who had always dreamed of flying, but had been stopped by poor eyesight, began reminding her soon after Christmas 1984 of the approaching deadline. Yet still Christa stalled until, ten days before the application was due, she finally sat down with the package and the list of eight essay questions. Staying up late in the evenings after the rest of the family was in bed, McAuliffe wrote and rewrote her responses to “Why do you want to be the first U.S. private citizen in space?” and “Describe your teaching philosophy”; she signed a contract waiving her rights to government benefits including life insurance; and she agonized over the project she would choose to conduct in space. At the last possible minute, on February 1, 1985, she dropped off the completed package at the post office in Concord. She was one of seventy-nine teachers to apply from New Hampshire, but when the members of the state selection board met her a few months later, they knew right away that McAuliffe would be on their list of finalists. “She had that girl-next-door quality,” said one. “A kind of wholesome American look.”
Meanwhile, in Texas, the training of those passengers NASA had already promised a ride aboard the shuttle had begun.
Greg and Marcia Jarvis had landed at Hobby Airport in Houston on a Muse Air plane from California one crisp afternoon in the first week of January 1985. With their dog, Syrah, languishing in a pet carrier, they took a cab to the Peachtree Apartments, a long-stay complex ten minutes from the back gates of the Johnson Space Center, where the couple planned to live for the next three months. Marcia had taken a sabbatical from work while Greg trained for his spaceflight. Jarvis’s backup, Bill Butterworth, and his wife, Jenny, moved into an apartment a few doors down.
Jarvis was scheduled to fly on the shuttle in March, on a mission set to carry into orbit one of the big Hughes satellites he had helped build out at the plant in Los Angeles, and as the weeks went by his preparation for the launch intensified. First, he and Butterworth took a trip aboard the Vomit Comet. The two men flew forty parabolas in total: Butterworth, who had occasional vertigo, was sick on all but six; Jarvis didn’t suffer at all. The following week, the engineers spent a morning in firefighting practice with the shuttle crew they’d been assigned to, learning to extinguish gasoline fires, wrangling the powerful hoses as part of a team. Back home at the Peachtree Apartments, Marcia and Jenny Butterworth watched the black smoke rising on the horizon before going out for an afternoon of riding lessons with Bob Crippen’s wife, Ginny, at the stables she ran nearby. Two days after that, it was Greg’s turn for ejection seat training.
Over the months Jarvis and Butterworth spent together in Houston, the two engineers grew close to their shuttle crew, under commander Dan Brandenstein—a former Navy test pilot, and the only one among them who had flown in space before. Amid the acrimonious competition for flight assignments, the payload specialist program had long been regarded with suspicion by some astronauts. Although embraced by George Abbey, the initiative had been fought almost from the beginning by Chris Kraft, who believed that their jobs would be better done by fully trained members of the astronaut corps. Yet—while it soon became clear that Jarvis would have little to do with placing the Hughes satellite in orbit—Brandenstein and his crew tried hard to make both Greg and Bill feel a valuable part of the team, treating them as aerospace professionals with a key role in the mission. After hours, the astronauts and their families welcomed the two engineers and their wives to cookouts and dinners, with parties for birthdays and Super Bowl Sunday.
By late February, the final preparations for the mission were under way: in Building 5 at the Space Center, Jarvis joined the crew in the shuttle mock-up for a thirty-four-hour flight simulation, involving a full-strength team in Mission Control, that took them through everything from liftoff to landing in real time; arriving home at eight-thirty one Wednesday evening, he slept for as long as he could, before rising to join the simulation again at 4:00 a.m. Jarvis posed with the crew for a series of official NASA portraits, and at the end of the month received his mission patch—featuring his name among those of his fellow astronauts, embroidered beneath an image of a golden eagle and the shuttle soaring through space.
But the ambitious shuttle flight schedule continued to be hobbled by delays and worrying technical problems. At the beginning of the year, the fifteenth shuttle launch—and the first classified military flight in NASA’s history—of Discovery, had been pushed back due to record-breaking cold weather that swept down the Eastern Seaboard. The public was kept in the dark about much of the mission: NASA refused even to release precise launch or landing times in advance, and ground-to-air communication with the crew would be encrypted throughout the flight. But agency engineers did admit to fears that three consecutive nights of freezing conditions had caused icing on the launchpad—threatening to damage Discovery’s heat-shield tiles—forcing them to postpone the planned liftoff.
The second mission of the year, aboard Challenger, had been initially slated for February—but the launch was delayed again and again, at first as technicians at Cape Canaveral worked to replace four thousand of the orbiter’s tiles, which had come loose on its previous voyage; the problems made news in part because the crew included Republican Senator Jake Garn, who aimed to become the first politician in space. Congressmen and senators alike had lobbied NASA since the inaugural shuttle launch for an invitation to fly into orbit, but Garn had been both persistent and hard to ignore: as chairman of the Senate committee that controlled funding for NASA, he could make life awkward for Administrator Beggs if he didn’t get what he wanted.
Garn maintained that it was a constitutional necessity for him to fly aboard the shuttle as an “observer”—a payload specialist whose expertise was to understand where taxpayers’ money was going. This rationalization fooled no one. The press derided Beggs’s formal invitation to Garn to become a politician-astronaut as “the ultimate junket”; but when, at last, the Challenger mission was finally canceled, it meant that the Senator was first in line for the next available seat into orbit.
On March 1, 1985, with less than three weeks to go before he expected to go into space, Greg Jarvis learned that his mission with Dan Brandenstein’s crew had also been postponed; the payload specialist positions for forthcoming flights would have to be reshuffled. After an agonizingly long weekend of uncertainty—leavened only by a trip to the movies in Houston to see the new Eddie Murphy film Beverly Hills Cop—Jarvis was at home sick with flu when the phone finally rang. It was Bill Butterworth with the news that Greg was out: Senator Garn would be taking his place as a payload specialist on the next shuttle flight; Jarvis would just have to wait for a new assignment, perhaps at the end of the summer. The decision was announced to the public at noon the following day, and—although NASA insisted it had come under no political pressure—in Houston the evening news carried calls for Garn to be investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee. No one from the agency bothered to officially inform Jarvis he had been cut from the mission. Nonetheless, he booked a function room in their apartment complex for a party to bid goodbye to Brandenstein and his crew, who he and Marcia had come to consider good friends. While Greg made the arrangements for their farewell dinner, Marcia called the movers to take them back to California. On the day they left for the airport, rain sluiced from the skies.
In her room at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington, DC, Christa McAuliffe unpacked her clothes for the week, including the eight new outfits her parents had bought her for the occasion, and then sat down to survey her competition. NASA public affairs officials had given each of the Teacher in Space semifinalists a set of capsule biographies of everyone involved, describing their background and achievements. Now, the more McAuliffe read of the 112 other teachers with whom she would be competing in what amounted to an extended talent contest, the further her spirits fell. She reached for the phone and called her husband at home in Concord.
“Steve, these people are doctors and authors and Fulbright scholars and teachers of the year and a woman who climbed the Himalayas and…” She trailed off. “I’m out of my league,” she said, her voice flat. “I haven’t got a chance.”
“Hang in there,” Steve said. “You’re doing fine. You wouldn’t be there if you didn’t have merit. Just relax and have a good time.”
The Teacher in Space events had begun earlier that June evening with a banquet in the grand ballroom of the L’Enfant Plaza—a Watergate-era hotel and shopping mall a few blocks from NASA headquarters—and a welcome speech delivered by James Beggs. The candidates, chosen from all over the United States—as well as territories in the South Pacific and the Arctic Circle—had been invited to the nation’s capital to attend lectures from astronauts and space agency staff, workshops and parties, and a special screening of the shuttle documentary The Dream Is Alive.
At the climax of it all, they would each face interviews with judges from a panel of fourteen men and six women, which included a former professional basketball player, the inventor of the artificial heart, astronauts Deke Slayton and Gene Cernan, and the actress Pam Dawber—who had starred opposite Robin Williams in the screwball science fiction TV show Mork & Mindy. The ten finalists chosen by the panel would be sent to Houston for a week of more intensive tests and interviews, before James Beggs himself selected the winner—who would then go into orbit aboard the shuttle Challenger early the following year.
The Teacher in Space mission would be the twenty-fifth flight of the shuttle, designated STS-51-L and scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral in January 1986, with an experienced crew already selected by George Abbey. Commander Dick Scobee and Mission Specialists Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, and Ellison Onizuka would all be making their second flights into space. Only the pilot, Mike Smith—a soft-spoken Navy flier and former test pilot who had arrived at NASA with the second group of new astronaut recruits in 1980—had yet to cross the Karman Line. In the ballroom of L’Enfant Plaza, Smith followed James Beggs up to the podium to explain the details of the 51-L mission. He discussed the other members of the crew, and told the audience how much he was looking forward to joining the select fraternity of those who had seen the Earth from orbit. If space flight was even half as remarkable as his fellow astronauts had described it, he said, both he and the winning teacher were in for the adventure of a lifetime.
Over the next few days, the 113 candidates attended a series of NASA lectures intended to reveal a less idealized picture of the commitment the world’s first teachernaut would be expected to make. The winner of the competition would report to Houston in early September 1985 for three months of flight training, and would be required to publicize their experience in the program for at least a year after their return from orbit. Frank Johnson, NASA’s director of public affairs, explained that the winning candidate would become one of the most recognizable faces of the agency, a national spokesperson helping to boost public enthusiasm for its work—and justify the continuation of its $7.6 billion budget. There would be more interviews and autographs than they would want; their lives would no longer be their own as they were plunged into the fishbowl of celebrity; the media would come at them from all sides. “Nobody’s going to be out to destroy the space program,” he said, “but, you know, when you get fingers into the pie, sometimes things can get messed up.”
The teachers received a briefing on how to deal with the press—and the director of the agency’s Public Service Division, Chester Lee, was frank about the difficulties they were having keeping the shuttle on its launch schedule, and how the delays were undermining the agency’s commercial satellite delivery business; but he emphasized that there would never be pressure to fly at the cost of safety. He explained that there were repeated Flight Readiness Reviews leading up to every launch, and each system on the shuttle had multiple redundancies, designed to keep the spacecraft flying even after multiple failures; those that could not be equipped with fail-safe systems were built to take twice as much punishment as might be expected on a normal flight. He used the solid rocket boosters as an illustration: they had double the insulation necessary to prevent hot gases burning through the casing, because the engineers were especially concerned about the two minutes during which the shuttle relied on them to carry it into orbit. “If one of those rockets goes, why, it’s pretty bad,” he said.
Still, an air of unreality prevailed. At a press conference later that same day, the candidates were paraded before the TV cameras as dozens of reporters peppered them with questions, and the teachers raised their hands to answer. Amid the thicket of waving arms, no one called upon Christa McAuliffe. But Sophia Clifford, a chemistry teacher from Alabama, told the journalists that she thought she might win the contest because she’d recently received a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant in Birmingham. Clifford explained that, cracking it open, she had found an auspicious prophecy on the slip of paper inside:
You’ve been promised a ride on a starship by the galactic wizard.