New Hampshire Contributions Historic in Space Exploration

McAuliffe, who taught social studies at Concord High School, won national admiration for her everwoman appeal, infectious enthusiasm, and out- of-the-ordinary field trips with her students. (Photo: David Lazar)

CONCORD – Bob Veilleux looked up at the crisp, cobalt sky and knew something was wrong well before the voice on the loudspeaker confirmed it so.

The date was January 28, 1986, and Veilleux, a popular veteran science instructor at Manchester’s Central High School, was among dozens of educators on hand to view history from the bleachers at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. For Veilleux, the moment was to be especially proud. This, after a national competition named him New Hampshire’s alternate for Concord High School social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe as the first educator to go into space.

Seventy three seconds into the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, Veilleux’s heart and that of the state and nation leapt from its collective chest. “Several of us science people in the audience knew the sequencing wasn’t right – the separation wasn’t supposed to happen that early,” Veilleux says of the eventual explosion that turned the blue morning sky into a cascading umbrella of white and orange. “You saw cheers turn quickly to tears… That’s when the voice came over speaker announcing, ‘There appears to have been a major malfunction.’

“There are tragedies that occur in all of our lifetimes – moments we live with for the rest of our lives,” he continues. “This was certainly one of them.”

Derry’s Alan Shepard caught the world’s attention in 1961 as the first American in space, and ten years later as the oldest man on the moon at age 47. (Photos courtesy of McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center)

Next January will mark a quarter century since the Challenger disaster; 25 years since Americans and Granite Staters of every generation and background united in grief after investing unprecedented hope and emotion in the first private citizen – someone just like one of them –selected for what was billed as “the ultimate field trip.”

For Veilleux, now a part-time educator at the newly expanded McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, January 2011 will be a time for him, fellow educators, and visitors to reflect and pay special tribute to McAuliffe’s memory and legacy.

It will also be a time, they hope, for visitors to see, realize and appreciate one tiny state’s unexpectedly immense role in the history of spaceflight.

With less than a quarter of the population of the Houston metro area alone – dubbed the nation’s Space City because of the Johnson Space Center – New Hampshire residents have never let their state’s small stature keep them from looking to the heavens and thinking big.

From a series of trailblazing astronauts to the region’s only aerospace museum and companies that have changed the way NASA engineers approached exploration of the stars, the Granite State has enjoyed a long and, at times, unlikely connection with the cosmos.

No exploration, of course, can begin without citing McAuliffe’s fellow namesake on the Discovery Center entryway – the first American in space, Derry’s Alan Shepard.

Born in 1923 to a prominent banking family on East Derry Road, Shepard had grown up inspired by the adventure and daring of Charles Lindbergh – the first to cross the Atlantic by air – and a desire to one day pilot his own aircraft and make history. “Nothing could stop Alan from flight,” says Richard Holmes, Director of the Derry Heritage Museum, where an entire room chock-a-block with photos, street signs, dolls, documents, literature and life-size cutouts is dedicated to Shepard. “He just had this sense of adventure from the time he was young, whether it was kite flying or sailing on Beaver Lake. He had a newspaper route just so he

(Photos courtesy of McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center)

could save money for a bicycle to ride over to Grenier Field.”

At Grenier Field in Manchester, Shepard would earn money sweeping floors, so he could pay the pilots there for flying lessons. He’d go on to serve his country during WWII aboard a naval destroyer and earn his pilot’s wings in 1947, flying several tours from aircraft carriers. Twelve years later, Shepard was among the nation’s top 110 test pilots invited by the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration to join the space program. On May 5, 1961, as church bells rang and fire sirens sounded down Broadway in Derry to mark the occasion, Shepard launched into orbit, helming the Freedom 7 mission.

“It was a huge thing,” Holmes says. “America in 1961 was space crazy. We had this competition with the Russians, and there was just this feeling that communism would take over because they were the first in space. But Alan turned out better than Yuri Gagarin… He even made the cover of Archie Comics – if that’s not success, I don’t know what is!”

Indeed, to visit Derry today is to see a witness shrine to its favorite son, from the stretch of I-93 that passes Derry,

dedicated in 1963 as the Alan Shepard Highway, to the Pinkerton Academy high school football team – the Astros – and the state legislature’s eventual decision to proclaim Derry the state’s official ‘Space Town.’ “There’s a certain pride in a small town like ours of letting the world know that we exist,” Holmes says. “This was an incredibly important moment for us as a community.”

Derry Heritage Museum Director Rick Holmes dedicated special room at the museum to Alan Shepard’s historic accomplishments. (Photo: David Lazar)

In the years after his first historic flight, Shepard would overcome Meniere’s Disease, a debilitating condition afflicting the inner ear, before walking on the moon for the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 at age 47, the oldest man to do so. While he spent much of his remaining years in Houston, locals say Shepard’s true home never changed, evidenced by his frequent flights into Grenier Field to visit his mother and his practice of tipping his wings as he flew over Derry.

Twenty five years after Shepard’s inaugural orbit, another New Hampshire resident, Concord’s Christa Auliffe, would make history of her own, winning a national competition among 11,500 teachers to become the first educator in space. McAuliffe’s feat came at a time when public support for funding the space program was in decline, and NASA needed a way both to humanize and spark new interest in its efforts. McAuliffe – who’d herself grown up watching John Glenn’s historic flight and dreamed of going to space – would do just that, with her everywoman appeal, unflagging enthusiasm, easy smile, and penchant for out-of-the-ordinary field trips with her students. “Just having me fly is a very clear message that space is accessible,” she would say. “You’re taking an everyday, ordinary person on board the space shuttle and flying her. It means something because we are teachers, and teachers are approachable people.”

Concord High School social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe helped revive national enthusiasm for NASA, before her tragic death in the Challenger disaster in 1986. (Photos courtesy of McAuliffe- Shepard Discovery Center)

“For her to make the selection from tiny New Hampshire was a huge deal,” says Dave McDonald, educational director at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. “One thing that keeps coming through is that she was a super educator. She was a person who just loved people, and people loved her back. Her thing was that she was just an ordinary citizen – and of course, she was anything but ordinary – and that she was taking the ‘ultimate field trip.’”

McAuliffe was selected in July 1985, and soon underwent a battery of training in Houston to prepare for the Challenger mission. From the Challenger, McAuliffe, one of seven astronauts aboard the mission, was to conduct several lesson plans for her class and thousands of others across the nation via satellite. “The hope for NASA was to get the average person interested in space, and Christa’s natural charisma managed to generate tremendous appeal both nationally and internationally,” Veilleux recalls.

Veilleux, an astronomy teacher who’d developed a close collegial relationship with McAuliffe in the months leading to the launch, was sitting behind her family the morning of January 28, 1986. Investigators in the months and years following the disaster would determine that a faulty O-ring – a piece of rubber designed to prevent leaks – failed in the frigid air that morning. “That shuttle should have never taken off that morning,” Veilleux says. “It was way too cold outside.” Veilleux watched as shock turned to intense grief – a feeling echoed in classrooms and millions of households – as much of the world witnessed the event live on television.

(Photo courtesy of McAuliffe- Shepard Discovery Center)

“The mood up here in New Hampshire when we returned was utter disbelief,” he recalls. “There was so much pride in Christa being the teacher to represent all of us. There was an incredible amount of hurt. The city and the state seemed to just shudder and hold it in.” On the Thursday morning after the disaster, a memorial service was held in front of the State House, where

Veilleux read a prepared message from teachers. McAuliffe’s remains would be laid to rest in Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord. In the years following the Challenger tragedy, her name would grace some 40 schools around the world, while every year since 1986, the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Nashua has devoted itself to the use of technology in all aspects of education.

In Concord, meanwhile, what began in 1990 as the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium dramatically grew last year with a 33,000-square-foot, $15-million expansion to become the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. Today, the center features the only interactive, hands-on exhibition of its kind in the world on black holes. “The Discovery Center is the perfect memorial to honor Christa, because it has, in fact, become New Hampshire’s premier field trip destination,” McDonald says. “If there is something we want children to leave with, it is a little more insight about each of these American heroes… We also want them to leave feeling good about their home state. Christa and Alan were extraordinary firsts in our history, and should be points of proper pride for New Hampshire.”

Built as a lasting memorial to her work, the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord was expanded last year to become New England’s only aerospace science center. (Photo: David Lazar)

As, he adds, should several other notable New Hampshire residents whose encounters with the stars are chronicled at the center – astronauts like Manchester’s Lee Morin, a medical doctor and Captain in the U.S. Navy, who in 2002 embarked on the 13th Shuttle mission to the International Space Station; astronauts like Hanover’s Jay Buckey, Pelham’s Rick Linnehan, and Portsmouth’s Rick Searfoss, who in 1998 took part in NASA’s 16-day Neurolab mission to study the effects of gravity-loss on the brain and nervous system – a mission informally known as “the New Hampshire flight.”

“To say we had three people from a tiny state with just 1.5 million people was quite a feat,” says Buckey, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School who served as a payload specialist aboard Neurolab. “I think it’s safe to say we had the highest per capita representation for one state on one flight. All of us had very different connections to New Hampshire. And all of us were extremely honored to represent our home state.”

Searfoss, an aeronautical engineer who logged more than 39 days in space, has since retired from NASA service, while Linnehan, a veterinarian, continues to serve, having now logged more than 59 days in space, including six spacewalks. Buckey, who returned to medicine, helps to lead the Discovery Center’s public education efforts, including an annual statewide astronomy bowl.

Just as Granite State residents have taken giant leaps for mankind, so too have several of its companies, whose inventions have enhanced the way NASA engineers approach space travel – companies like Keene’s Timken, whose split ball bearings are now used on the space shuttle’s main engine; like BAE systems of Nashua which created the computers for the Mars Rover in 2004; and like Hanover’s Creare, Inc. which created the cryocooler for the Hubbell space telescope in 2002.

And then there’s Shepard himself, whose time spent training for his inaugural spaceflight yielded an unlikely invention. Often locked in a capsule for several hours on end without the ability to exit, duty was not the only thing that called for Shepard. Nature did, as well. And so was invented the modern diaper,

Pelham’s Rick Linnehan, Portsmouth’s Rick Searfoss, and Hanover’s Jay Buckey with NH-shaped maple candies aboard NASA’s 1998 Neurolab mission, believed to be the largest concentration from one state ever on one spaceflight. (Photo courtesy of Jay Buckey)

which replaced the standard cotton filling with a polymer called sodium polyacrylate – a crystal that could absorb up to 300 times its weight in water. It’s a feat Veilleux demonstrates almost daily to schoolchildren, filling up one plastic cup with water, another with crystals, combining the two, and then suspending the mixed product upside down over one brave volunteer’s head. The head remains dry, since the water has become a gelled solid.

“It’s funny to see all of the New Hampshire connections,” Veilleux says. “Even the one true scientist who went to the moon and the last man to walk on it, Harrison Schmitt – I had an opportunity to meet him and found out tha

t his grandparents…. were from Claremont!

“Each of these things gives you a little bit of pride to be from this state,” he continues. “We may be small in some ways, but we’re mighty in a lot of others. There’s a lot of Yankee spirit up here, and people aren’t afraid of taking chances, rolling up their sleeves, and doing big things.”

Thanks to McAuliffe’s and Shepard’s sacrifices and the education efforts still under way, it is a legacy likely to last a very long time.

Special thanks to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, the Derry Heritage Museum, and Dr. Jay Buckey for their generosity and assistance with this story.

Retired science teacher Bob Veilleux, a part- time educator at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, was chosen as McAuliffe’s NH alternate for the ill-fated 1986 Challenger flight. (Photo: David Lazar)