HOUSTON -- As NASA employees and family members gather at Johnson Space Center and Arlington National Cemetery Thursday to mark the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, a group of young students will be hard at work at the Houston Museum of Natural Science keeping the Challenger legacy alive.
"You are sitting in the first Challenger Learning Center," Dr. Carolyn Sumners said.
It's now called the Expedition Center. Created two years after the Challenger explosion, it was the first of now more than 40 Challenger Learning Centers across the country. They include mockups of Mission Control and Space Station-themed science stations where students can get hands-on experience pretending to be a team of astronauts.
Steeped in STEM education, the role-playing gives students first-hand experience in moon and Mars-mission scenarios. Lessons in science and a dose of inspiration that has reached more than 250,000 students in Houston and an estimated 4.4 million people at Challenger Learning Centers across the country.
"It's nice to think that maybe in some way, we are completing the essence of what they wanted to do," Sumners said of the Challenger astronauts.
Sumners started the first Challenger Learning Center with Dr. June Scobee Rodgers, widow of shuttle Challenger Commander Richard Scobee, hoping to continue the education-themed programs that were to be part of the Challenger mission. This week the life-long educator sent a thank you message to the program's supporters on the CLC website.
"On this 30th anniversary, I am full of such pride," Scobee Rodgers said. "You've given us the opportunity to continue the Teacher in Space Mission and keep alive the legacy of our loved ones."
"They were such an incredibly exciting team," Sumners said of the seven astronauts she helped train in the museum planetarium in the months before their flight. The mission was to coincide with the arrival of Halley's Comet and several lessons from space were to be a part of the Teacher in Space Project.
Schoolteacher and astronaut Christa MacAuliffe was to provide that inspiration from space back in 1986. But Sumners and Scobee Rodgers believe that the woman who once said, "I teach....and I touch the future" is still doing exactly that: inspiring students to reach for their dreams.
"And those kind of messages I think we're delivering," Sumners said. "And you always think about those astronauts. Surely they would be proud."
