Top christa mcauliffe for 2018

In this straightforward memoir, McAuliffe's mother, Grace George Corrigan, makes it very clear just who and what the nation lost in the Challenger tragedy. The product of family history, notes and letters, and the commemorative efforts to honor her daughter, A Journal for Christa provides a very personal biography of a remarkable young woman.

Christa McAuliffe's story is solidly Americanthe eldest child of a close Catholic Massachusetts family, and a dedicated Girl Scout, she came of age in the turbulent sixties and early seventies and became a schoolteacher and mother. Generous, outgoing, funny, and beloved by her many friends and students, she was little known beyond her personal circle until selected by NASA to be the first civilian sent on a space mission as the "Teacher in Space." Whether or not the selection was a publicity stunt, Christa McAuliffe may have proved more than NASA bargained for. Honest, direct, and outspoken, she was impatient with the stultifying ceremonies of the government bureaucracy and did not hesitate to speak out on behalf of the constituency she felt she had been selected to represent: American public schoolteachers and the children in their classrooms.

Come Fly with Usis the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as payload specialists came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA s struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks.

While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107.