Christa McAuliffe

Born Sharon Christa Corrigan in Boston, the eldest of five, and known by her middle name from childhood. She took her degree at Framingham State in 1970 and a master's in education from Bowie State in 1978, and taught American history and civics in Maryland before moving to Concord, New Hampshire.

From 1983 she taught social studies at Concord High School - American history, law, economics, and a course she wrote herself called The American Woman. She took her classes on field trips and brought speakers in, and taught that ordinary people mattered to the historical record as much as kings and generals.

The day after John Glenn orbited the Earth she told a friend at school that one day people would take a bus to the Moon, and that she wanted to do it. On her NASA application she wrote: I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate.

She was chosen from more than eleven thousand applicants for the Teacher in Space Project and was to have taught two fifteen-minute lessons from orbit - a tour of the spacecraft called The Ultimate Field Trip, and a lesson called Where We've Been, Where We're Going, Why. They were to be broadcast into classrooms across the country, which is why so many children were watching that morning.

Asked on television about the mission she said: if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.

She was thirty-seven. Her children Scott and Caroline were nine and six. Her daughter became a teacher.

She is buried at Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord. About forty schools around the world carry her name, and a crater on the Moon and one on Venus. The statue of her at the New Hampshire State House has four words cut into the pedestal: I touch the future, I teach.

Her husband Steven and their children Scott and Caroline.