Christa McAuliffe quotes:

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.

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

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.

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

Imagine a history teacher making history,

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

May your future be limited only by your dreams!

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

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

Space is going to be commonplace.

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.

Reach for the stars.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

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

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

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.

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.

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.