Daily Mail News
By TONY RENNELL
PUBLISHED: 02:20 EDT, 8 June 2024 | UPDATED: 11:20 EDT, 8 June 2024
The supervisor of the Nasa support team seeing the crew into the Challenger space shuttle on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral had a very special present for one of the seven — a red apple for the most famous teacher in the world.
Bubbly, auburn-haired, girl-next-door Christa McAuliffe, a smiley social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, had been selected from some 11,000 applicants to be the first civilian in space — a stunt intended to revive flagging public interest in space exploration by making it seem accessible to ordinary people.