She was always late.

Come second period, her hair still wasn’t fully dry. 

She wore a strapless dress to the Marian High School dance, in defiance of school rules. 

She loved experiential learning so much they called her “Queen of the Field Trips.” Space being the “ultimate field trip,” she later said.

I’m always surprised by how many people now have never heard of Christa McAuliffe. The Teacher in Space was so big, so important when I was a child— even though she never got there, she was The Teacher in Space! Or, maybe especially because she didn’t get there. Because we do not always get there, to where we think we’re going.

The Teacher in Space Project isn’t just about Christa McAuliffe—it’s about how we write about lives, what it is to live, and to be alive right now. It is about the mix of joy and grief and climate emergencies and genocides and words and prayers and sunny days and sad days and long nights that make up a life right now.

The Teacher in Space Project is biography, but it is a biography engaged with how we write biography, what biography can do, and the moral obligations biographers have—to their biographical subjects, but also to themselves and the world in which they live. The Teacher in Space Project is a book about Christa McAuliffe, but it is also a book in which Christa McAuliffe teaches us about the preciousness of being alive and of learning, as she calls upon us to consider how we write about and think about other people’s lives.

I tell my students we don’t have to know where we’re going when we start to write—that writing is thinking and sometimes it’s the writing that takes us where we are trying to go.

But writing is also living and life can also throw things at us, things that we never even dreamed.

She sat there as a little girl, watching the television, watching as Alan Shepard rode into the history books on Freedom 7, becoming the first American to travel in space. She watched it at home and then they watched it again at school the next day.

“It was so exciting,” Christa McAuliffe told an interviewer later. “I mean, this was real… you know.”

What is it to live through history, to teach through history, to be in history, to survive history? The Teacher in Space Project is an effort to explore possible answers to that question that beguiles all biographers: Who was she? But, more than that, it’s an exploration of how lives are written, the messy beauty of the relationships we teachers build in our classrooms, and the lived texture of a teaching life.

Christa was special and yet also recognizable. She wasn’t just one of us, a clichéd thing we say about well-known people in order to humanize them. Rather, as Peter Billingsley—star of A Christmas Story and former ambassador for NASA’s Young Astronauts Program—said: “She was ours.” 

The Teacher in Space Project is an effort, in writing, to capture that dynamic. Darting through space and time and, at moments, collapsing them altogether, this work represents a ground-breaking, kaleidoscopic, deeply personal, feminist account of a historical figure who captured the attention of a nation and excited a whole generation of students, forever fixing their eyes towards the stars.