By Rick Steelhammer
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Forty years ago this week, after spending five days at Cape Canaveral and enduring three aborted launch attempts of the Space Shuttle Challenger while waiting to see fellow Teacher in Space candidate Christa McAuliffe begin a six-day mission in space, Melanie Vickers decided it was time to go home.
A series of weather and technical issues delayed the Challenger launch well past its initial launch date of Jan. 22, 1986.
“Since it was unknown when the launch would really take place, I wanted to go back to Charleston and be with my students,” said Vickers, then the principal at Watts Elementary School. “I flew back home on Super Bowl Sunday (Jan. 26), and, on Monday, the launch was delayed again, due to the weather concerns.”
On Tuesday, Jan. 28, 1986, after a two-hour postponement over icing issues, NASA officials green-lighted the mission for an 11:38 a.m. launch.
“I ran back to the cafeteria, where a television had been set up for the school to watch the launch,” Vickers recalled.
“When I got there, a teacher grabbed me and said, ‘You’re not going to believe what happened.’ I looked at the TV and saw clouds bursting, then twisting in crazy-looking directions, and heard a man’s voice saying, ‘The vehicle has exploded.’ I thought, ‘It can’t be true.’”
But the reality of the situation was that, 73 seconds after liftoff, the Challenger was ripped apart by an explosion, killing all seven members of its crew.
A faulty fuel cell seal on a booster rocket was later determined to have caused the blast.
“The little kindergart-ners who had been watching looked at me, scared and confused,” Vickers recalled. “I really didn’t know what to say to them at the time. I was dealing with my own grief.”
Vickers was 1 of 114 in McAuliffe’s program
Vickers was one of 114 teachers from across the nation selected from a field of more than 11,000 appli-cants as a candidate for the Teacher in Space program, announced by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1985. The program was part of a NASA initiative to expand its Space Flight Program to a wider set of private citizens who would communicate their experiences to the public.
Successful candidates completed an extensive NASA application for the program. Then they wrote a series of essays on why they wanted to participate and what they could bring, passed a physical exam, created a teaching plan and produced a video of themselves demonstrating their communications skills.
Two teachers from each state were selected, along with 14 from U.S. territories and military bases across the world.
“I was over the moon when I found out I was one of the two teachers from West Virginia to be selected,” Vickers said.
During summer 1985, the 114 semifinalists for an upcoming NASA space shuttle flight spent a week in Washington, D.C., to learn more about the space program, what the experience of being an astronaut entails, and to be interviewed by a panel of judges selected by NASA to determine who would be among the 10 finalists to begin training for a space shuttle mission.
“It was a fabulous one-week science conference,” Vickers recalled. Speakers included NASA astronauts Mike Smith, who would pilot the ill-fated Challenger mission, and Judith Resnick, an engineer who would serve as mission specialist aboard Challenger.
The 114 semifinalists were divided into groups of about 30 when traveling between planned activities during their stay in the nation’s capital.
“Christa McAuliffe was in my group,” Vickers said. “While every teacher there had something outstanding to offer, Christa really stood out — she had a presence about her that was very appealing. She was very attractive and well-spoken but, mainly, she had an enthusiasm for teaching, and it was obvious she would be able to communicate that back to the world.”
McAuliffe, a high school social studies teacher in New Hampshire, was one of the 10 teachers to make the final cut and be vetted to begin astronaut training. Among the other nine finalists was Niki Wenger, a Parkersburg junior high school teacher who never realized her dream to fly in space.
Vickers and the other semifinalists were named NASA Space Ambassadors, charged with spreading the word about the nation’s space program and the op-portunities it, and its related technology, created for students.
“I was disappointed that I didn’t make the final cut, but glad to have made it as far as I did,” she said. “I came back with a huge amount of teaching material, and I traveled the state at night and on weekends,” spreading the word about the space program at schools, colleges and civic organizations.
Vickers’ mission to honor McAuliffe
The week following the Challenger disaster, Vickers and her fellow Space Ambassadors traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to attend the memorial service for the seven members of the Challenger crew.
There, Reagan told mourners that the relatives of each crew member he spoke with asked him to “continue the program, that that is what their departed loved one would want above all else . . . to forge ahead with a space program that is effective, safe and efficient, but also bold and committed to reach out for new goals and ever greater achievements.”
“On the way back from the service,” Vickers said, “I decided I needed to find a way to help the kids cope with the loss of the Challenger crew but also show them that you don’t quit and give up when tragedy strikes.”
The solution was supplied by a friend and former classmate, Logan County teacher Terilyn Wilson, who had seen a statue of Benjamin Franklin covered with thousands of pennies contributed by schoolchildren in a Philadelphia park. Why not commission a similar statue in West Virginia, she suggested, only this one modeled on McAuliffe?
From that vision, the West Virginia Pennies for Christa project took shape, through which more than $13,000 worth of pennies donated by schoolchildren from all 55 counties were raised.
Sutton sculptor Bill Hopen was commissioned to create McAuliffe’s likeness, which was placed on the grounds of the former Sunrise Museum, now the home of the Farmer, Cline & Campbell law offices at 746 Myrtle Road, overlooking downtown Charleston.
“From there, right over the hillside, Christa looks out over the skies above Charleston, with the Carriage Trail in the background,” Vickers said. “I go there frequently.”
Vickers said that, for two years following the Challenger disaster, she spent parts of her summers visit-ing sites associated with McAuliffe.
“Maybe it was for my own spirits, but I traveled to Christa’s school in New Hampshire and the junior high school in Virginia where she taught for eight or nine years before moving there,” Vickers said. “When I walked into her classrooms and stood there looking out the windows, it was like I almost felt her presence.
“I believe Christa would want us to protect the fu-ture and show our children what’s possible,” she added. “And the future sits in our classrooms every day.”
Vickers also visited the Girl Scout camp where McAuliffe spent time in her youth and attended a session of the annual Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Massachusetts.
Return to Kennedy Space Center
In 2007, Vickers returned to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, piloted by Astronaut Scott Kelly of Arizona, on a mission to the International Space Station. The Endeavor’s crew included Barbara Morgan, who had been selected as McAuliffe’s back-up for the Challenger flight 21 years earlier.
A drawing was held among the Space Ambassador alumni gathered for the event for a chance to take part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a NASA KC-135 aircraft as it made a series of steep dives from an altitude of 32,000 feet. Vickers won.
“We made a couple of dives in which the gravity of Mars and the Moon were approximated, and then we got to experience weightlessness,” she said. “It was the highlight of my career.”
Now retired from Kanawha County Schools, where she worked as a teacher, principal and assistant superintendent, Vickers went to work for Marshall University, where she is an adjunct professor in leadership development.
Rick Steelhammer is a features reporter. He can be reached at 304-348-5169 or rsteelhammer@hdmediallc. com. Follow @rsteelhammer on X. See more from the Charleston Gazette