Christa McAuliffe Quotations

I will have a one-hour program called the Mission Watch, where I will describe details of the mission and give additional information about the lessons from space.

I really don't want to say goodbye to any of you people.

Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.

It's not the Olympics. It's Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I'm part of.

If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.

I will go around the space shuttle and give a guided tour of the major areas and describe what is done in each area. This will be called The Ultimate Field Trip.

If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what's going on up there in the space program, then my job's been done.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.

I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

I was a little concerned with how the crew was going to view me because I didn't know whether this program had been kinda forced down their throats. But they were wonderful.

My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.

The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came.

I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.

Sometimes when things get kind of frantic, it helps to call my husband Steve, because I think he's got a real good sense of where everything's gonna be in a few years.

We haven't sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, Now you realize that there's X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen.

The Twilight Zone' wasn't around with the kids. They think going up in space is neat. Within their lifetime, there will be paying passengers on the shuttle.

We sat around one night and thought that people are going to look back and say, I can't imagine there was a lot of excitement about HER going up!

I don't think any teacher is as ready as I am,

I touch the future. I teach. That's going with me.

I touch the future. I teach. I really appreciate that sentiment. That's going with me.

Space is for everybody. It's not just for a few people in science or math, or for a select group of astronauts. That's our new frontier out there, and it's everybody's business to know about space.

What are we doing here? We're reaching for the stars!

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

Imagine a history teacher making history,

No teacher has ever been better prepared to teach a lesson.

It was hard telling those kids...that I wasn't going to be there this year. And I knew I was going to miss them. I won't have an opportunity to see them again, unless they stop by the house. Now during the summer, I got lots of notes; kids would stop by the house. I'd be pulling weeds or something and they would come up and give me a hug and say, 'Oh, I can't believe it, this is so wonderful!' and just get very excited about it. It was hard not being in school. I would have loved to have gone back to school.

Just as the pioneer travelers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals, I, as a pioneer space traveler, would do the same.

Space is going to be commonplace.

May your future be limited only by your dreams!

You have to dream. We all have to dream. Dreaming is OK. Imagine me teaching from space, all over the world, touching so many peoples lives. Thats a teachers dream! I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!

I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries.

This is a kind of a personal message from me, and that is that teachers are good communicators, they do an important job in our society.