"Christa, In Her Own Words" "excerpted, Life, Feb. 1996:

   "I can remember being in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite, there was still so much unknown about space. People though Mars was probably populated. We had this black-and-white television in our little ranch house and we always used to sit on the floor two noses away. We were sitting there when Alan Shepard went up, really excited that man was actually able to go up and come back down and be okay, I have the Life magazine of the men walking on the moon. I have a box of papers at home of my own press coverage. When I'm sixty, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, 'What really happened that year?'
  "I had an opportunity to watch a liftoff. I can remember just feeling the sense of exhilaration when the shuttle went off. If anything the over-riding emotion of our launch is gonna just be excitement. I remember astronaut David Leetsma saying that he was so excited at liftoff the adrenaline didn't stop running for five hours.
   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.' If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came... They're space kids. Every shuttle mission's been successful... They think going up in space is neat."
   After receiving a school flag to take aboard the space shuttle McAuliffe told the assembled students, "I really don't want to say goodbye to any of you people." Adding that she would surely return for graduation ceremonies the following spring. It was in the same auditorium, four months later, that students watching a television monitor witnessed her spacecraft explosion.