Christa McAuliffe, the grin fling go-for-it "teacher-naut" from Concord, New Hampshire, said she was "reaching for the stars." Instead, she and the six other crew members of the space shuttle Challenger died when their craft exploded in flames only 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral last January 28. She never realized her dream of teaching earth bound students from a classroom in space.
Yet, the tragedy that cost these seven courageous persons their lives can teach us profound lessons that challenge us to change forever how we live. Here are seven such lessons that have influenced me to live differently from the way I did before.
1. LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
"Someone they admired and loved has been taken away," said Concord High School principal Charles Foley of the horrified students who had gathered in the school auditorium that morning to cheer the televised launch of their celebrated social studies teacher. "They have learned that nothing in this life is certain." Red-eyed students slouched wordlessly past as Foley shook his head and stared at the floor. He had just ordered the school closed to let faculty and students alike deal privately with their sorrow and shock.
Before the disaster, almost every one felt that launching the space shuttle was as routine as watching the sun rise over Florida. Twenty-four times before, NASA had successfully launched space shuttle missions with no loss of life. In most people’s minds, riding a shuttle into space had become scarcely more dangerous than boarding a 747 for London.
Christa McAuliffe must have felt the same way. On the morning of the fatal launch, a technician handed the teacher a shiny red apple. With a jaunty toss of her helmeted head, Christa winked at the technician and flashed her famous grin. "Save it for me, and I’ll eat it when I get back."
Crew member, Michael Smith, a decorated former navy jet fighter pilot in Vietnam, projected the same confident bravado, at least publicly. Six months before the launch, a friend told him, "Mike, you’ve lost your mind!"
"Don’t worry; it’s as safe as getting in any other airplane and flying," countered Smith, who as a high school quarterback used to infuriate his coach when he interrupted practice to watch Marine Corps jets take off nearby.
Privately, though, the easygoing North Carolinian reminded his relatives when he first joined NASA that flying in space was risky, not at all as safe as it might seem.
As his son and two daughters stood in the viewing stand at the Kennedy Space Center, shivering in the freezing temperature of a crystal-clear morning, shading their eyes and craning their necks with other relatives and friends of the astronauts, they saw the space shuttle their dad was piloting suddenly burst into a strange mushroom cloud that formed a twisted Y.
Fear and wonder ricocheted through their minds for 40 seconds of terrible suspense-filled silence. And then they heard the NASA announcer’s voice say with the somber tone of an undertaker, "We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded."
"Daddy!" shrieked Smith’s eight-year-old daughter, Erin, her voice breaking in muffled sobs. "I want you, Daddy. You always promised that nothing would happen."
Much as he wanted to, Michael Smith couldn’t keep that promise, and neither could we. The apostle James wrote these words nearly 2,000 years ago, but they seem especially appropriate for 1987: "Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or to morrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you don’t even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." James 4:13,14.
Ron McNair, the brilliant black physicist from Lake City, South Carolina, the karate expert who had chopped and kicked his way to a fifth-degree black belt, the musician who played his saxophone flawlessly, the devoted father and husband, the deacon of the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, understood that rocketing spaceward in the 2,250-ton shuttle with its in credibly complex systems required a faith in something greater than science.
In 1984 McNair told the congregation of the Baptist church in Los Angeles where he once worshiped, "I would not climb on top of that big piece of smoking hardware, strap myself down in that seat, sit down, and wait for the count to zero... and sail out of this world unless I knew that Jesus got in first."
Ron McNair believed that the only certain thing in our uncertain lives is the Lord of life, Jesus Christ, who the Bible declares is "the same yesterday and today and forever." Hebrews 13:8. He knew that not even death in a space shuttle explosion could separate him from "the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:39.
2. GRIEVE BUT DON’T GIVE UP.
Only when we share Ron McNair’s perspective of life can we truly live each moment to its fullest or cope with tragedy.
Not since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy had Americans grieved so deeply and collectively over a national tragedy. Since the Challenger seven came from all parts of the United States and represented all races and religions, it was almost as if the explosion of the space shuttle struck symbolically at America itself.
Ron McNair believed that the only certain thing in our uncertain lives is the Lord of life, Jesus Christ.
President Reagan ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff for nearly a week. As I drove through my town that week, every flag I saw tightened my throat and stung my eyes with tears. I thought of the astronauts who had given their lives for the space program and of their grieving families. But I noticed something else too. Although the flags I saw rested at half-staff, they were not drooping in despair but snapping proud and free in the breeze, as sharp as a soldier’s salute.
There is a time to mourn, and this was such a time. But we should never give up hope. Sometimes we must lower the flag to half-staff, but if we let the wind of hope keep it flying, we can raise it again to the top when the time of mourning is over and get on with life.
On Saturday, June 14, 1986, some 300 Concord High School seniors marched onto the football field for the graduation ceremony which Christa McAuliffe would have addressed had she returned from the mission that took her life. Class president Carina Joy Dolcino told the seniors and their families, "January 28, 1986 - the date will never be erased from our minds. Our students and the nation were bound together in grief. Together we learned to cope. Despite the hard times and tears, the good times outweigh the bad."
Carina’s comforting words sound like those the apostle Paul wrote to encourage the Corinthian Christians: "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." "Therefore we do not lose heart.... For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." 2 Corinthians 4:8,9,16,17.
3. IT’S VITAL TO HEED WARNINGS.
Faith that good will ultimately triumph doesn’t mean, of course, that we should take unnecessary risks and recklessly bring hard times on our selves and our families. We need to take all the precautions we can in each situation. We shouldn’t presume that everything’s going to be all right just because it has been in the past.
NASA officials could have prevented the space shuttle explosion if they had listened to the concerns of the engineers who designed the solid fuel booster rockets. The presidential commission to investigate the shuttle disaster discovered that Morton Thiokol engineers protested the launch because they feared the O-rings designed to keep hot gas from escaping through the booster rocket joints might fail in subzero temperatures. And, indeed, one did, triggering the explosion.
Marshall Space Flight Center officials, as well as Morton Thiokol managers, ignored the engineers’ warnings, and seven astronauts paid the price.
From Genesis to Revelation the Bible urges us to live our lives according to God’s principles of love and warns of the consequences if we refuse. God told Adam and Eve that they could eat fruit from every tree in the Garden of Eden except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they ate fruit from the forbidden tree, they would die.
Adam and Eve disregarded the divine warning, and today our world is a vast cemetery filled with the bodies of their descendants killed by disease, war, famine, and old age. In Revelation God gives a warning to all of us through the apostle John. After showing John the beauty of a new earth with no more death or pain, God told him: "He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars - their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death." Revelation 21:7, 8.
4. PEOPLE ARE INFINITELY VALUABLE.
Immediately after the shuttle exploded. Vice President George Bush and White House communication director Patrick Buchanan burst into the Oval Office to inform President Reagan. Startled by the interruption, the President looked up from the State of the Union address he was working on.
"There has been a serious incident with the shuttle," Bush said, out of breath.
Buchanan was more blunt. "Sir," he said, "the shuttle has exploded."
The President’s eyes widened. "Is that the one the teacher was on?" he asked.
A few days later at the memorial service in Houston, the President spoke words which touched the hearts of all Americans: "Dick, Mike, Judy, El, Ron, Greg, and Christa, your families and your country mourn your passing. We bid you goodbye, but we will never forget you.:
When we heard about the space shuttle explosion, we thought only about the seven men and women who died and of their families because one human life is worth infinitely more than billions of dollars of hardware.
I’m thankful to live in a country that values human life above everything else. I’m also thankful that the Bible tells us that God created us in His image. See Genesis 1:27. We didn’t evolve from some mindless blob of primeval protoplasm any more than the space shuttle emerged from a pile of scrap metal! God created us to love and serve others. And even when we disobeyed Him, He considered us to be so valuable that He sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us that we might have eternal life. See John 3:16.
Judith Resnik, the 36-year-old Jewish mission specialist and second American woman to fly in space, once wrote a poem for her Hebrew class. Although she probably didn’t realize it, her two-line poem perfectly describes the mission of the Messiah: "BLESSED IS THE MATCH THAT IS CONSUMED IN KINDLING A FLAME. BLESSED IS THE FLAME THAT BURNS THE SECRET FASTNESS OF THE HEART."
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus tell us one thing if they tell us anything at all: Only people make life worth living; only people make death worth dying.
5. TO ACCOMPLISH GREAT THINGS IN VOLVES GREAT RISK.
Pioneers in every age, from the crew of Christopher Columbus to the Challenger seven, have left their homes and risked their lives in the quest for a better world. Christa McAuliffe had planned to keep a daily journal of her experience in space because she considered the diaries of nineteenth century women pioneers to be among the richest history of America’s westward expansion.
Christa required her students in a class on the history of American women to read from the diaries about the risks the pioneers took and the hardships they encountered as they lurched and bumped across the prairies in covered wagons pulled by oxen.
One woman, pregnant with her eighth child on her way to Oregon, wrote about fording swollen streams, getting stuck in the mud, and suffering severe headaches. Another woman described the graves of other pioneers she saw along the way and the empathy she felt for them being buried alone in a wild land.
As a modern space pioneer, Christa McAuliffe experienced loneliness during her five-month training period in Houston while her husband, Steve, and their two small children, Scott and Caroline, remained in Concord. She wrote to a former teacher, "It’s hard being away from home, but we realized it was a tradeoff for a chance in a lifetime."
Perhaps she began to perceive the risk she was taking when her life insurance premium rose so dramatically that she canceled the policy. Later, she did accept a gift of one million dollars in life insurance coverage from a Washington, D.C., company. But really, no one, least of all Christa McAuliffe, expected that she, like many pioneers of the Old West, would give her life for the dream she loved.
Jesus Christ left everything and risked everything - position, power, and fellowship with His Father - in order to save us. He "did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!" Philippians 2:6-8.
What risks are we willing to take for Him? Do our jobs, our possessions, our families mean more to us than He does?
6. WE CAN NEVER REACH THE STARS WITHOUT DIVINE HELP.
Lorna Onizuka, widow of Ellison S. Onizuka, thinks the 39-year-old engineer and air force test pilot from Hawaii may have had a premonition of his death aboard the Challenger.
Before he went into space on his first mission aboard the shuttle Discovery, Onizuka prepared a book for his family that included insurance papers, family business instructions, and letters to his two teenage daughters. During that flight, the book remained sealed in a safe in the crew’s quarters at Cape Canaveral.
"Lorna," Onizuka asked his wife several times before the mission, "do you remember where the book is in case something should happen to me?"
"I was very uncomfortable with that, and he knew it," Lorna told a reporter later.
For his second flight, Onizuka didn’t mention the book but did something that Lorna now thinks is strange. As before, he called his family prior to boarding the space shuttle, but this time he told his daughters what he had written to them in the sealed letters.
The girls laughed and cried, then handed the phone back to their mother. Ellison and Lorna talked together softly He apologized for being gone so much, and she for nagging him. After the disaster, Lorna discovered that he had brought the book home instead of sealing it in the safe.
Before the launch, Onizuka told the press, "I’ll be looking at Halley’s Comet. They tell me I’ll have one of the best views around." Still, he realized that his own mortality and the limitations of human technology might prevent him from viewing the famous comet on its twice-a-century visit from the depths of outer space.
And he prepared himself and his family for that possibility.
America landed men on the moon in 1969, but in the euphoria of that feat we forgot how far away the stars really are. The moon lies only 250,000 miles from earth, but the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, shimmers 25 trillion miles away like a microscopic mirage in the vast desert of space. Traveling 25,000 miles an hour in a space vehicle would take astronauts 115,000 years to reach it or 1,150 lifetimes!
Our mortality locks us in the prison of time. Only Jesus Christ holds the keys to unlock the door of death. See Revelation 1:18. Only. He can travel free from the laws of physics. See Acts 1:9. The Bible promises us that Jesus will come soon and take us home with Him to the stars: "The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever." 1 Thessalonians 4:16, 17.
7. THE CHURCH NEEDS EVERYONE BE CAUSE HEAVEN IS FOR EVERYONE.
After 20 years as an elite domain of white male military officers, NASA announced in 1977 that it was looking for men and women of different races to diversify its astronaut corps; 8,079 men and women applied. NASA selected 11 and gradually began sending them into space.
But not before Challenger’s last flight in 1986 had such a cosmopolitan crew trained together for a space shuttle mission: Commander Francis R. Scobee, 46, an aerospace engineer and Vietnam combat pilot; Judith A. Resnik, 36, America’s second woman in space, holder of a doctorate in electrical engineering; Ellison S. Onizuka, 39, an air force test pilot with a Japanese Buddhist heritage; Michael J. Smith, 40, a much-decorated navy flier who won his pilot’s license before he knew how to drive a car; Gregory B. Jarvins, 41, a satellite designer for Hughes Aircraft Company who had been bumped from two previous shuttle flights; Ronald B. McNair, 36, an MIT physicist and the second black American in space; and, of course, Christa McAuliffe, 37, the first teacher in space, who captured the hearts and imaginations of all Americans.
They were America’s best and brightest-uncommonly intelligent, highly professional, and fiercely motivated.
Diverse in background, different in gender, divided by religion, the shuttle crew could not afford to let these things separate them. They knew they had to work together to accomplish their mission successfully. When they walked in single file toward the launching pad dressed alike in their blue NASA jumpsuits, they were one crew with one mission.
Like the Challenger seven, members of the Christian faith are one. "All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3:27, 28. Our Commander has given us a mission. "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Matthew 28:19.
Christ’s church needs all of its members working together in harmony, contributing their talents and spiritual gifts to accomplish the mission of preparing earth’s last generation for the greatest space journey of all time - the flight with Jesus and angels to the kingdom of the redeemed.
• James Fly is communication director, Mid-America Union of Seventh-day Adventists, Lincoln, Nebraska. © 1987 by James L. Fly.
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