Fiona Pepper

And then thirdly, attached on either side were two massive solid rocket boosters and these are the parts that Morton Thiokol was building in Utah.

They were something like 15 storeys high and they were built in sections and then pulled by train from Utah to Cape Canaveral in Florida where the space shuttles were being assembled.

So they were massive and the role of the solid rocket boosters or the SRBs

was to provide the thrust needed to get this huge stack off the ground and into orbit.

And then once that had happened, they got dropped into the ocean, they were collected, cleaned up, and then used again for the next launch.

Because NASA had set out to make space flight super regular, like almost as normal as hopping on a domestic airline.

And they were really frequent.

But like nationally, NASA was having a bit of a PR problem because people were starting to

to lose interest.

They'd set out to make spaceflight normal and they kind of succeeded.

So by 1986, they had this PR problem where people were disengaged.

TV networks weren't broadcasting launches.

And so they had to come up with ways to re-engage the public.

So they came up with this program called the Teacher in Space Program.

And it worked.

They got Americans on board.

They got people around the world on board.

because the Teacher in Space program was essentially a talent quest to find the right teacher to send to space, to teach a science class from space for the first time.

And this woman by the name of Krista McAuliffe, she was selected and she was perfect.

She was this charismatic, magnetic individual.