Politics & Power Quote by Christa McAuliffe

A carefully packaged bit of national theater, this line captures the optimistic sales pitch behind NASA's Teacher in Space project: make the Space Shuttle feel less like a Cold War machine and more like a family achievement. McAuliffe frames the mission as “important,” a word doing quiet political work. Space travel isn’t just technical progress; it’s a moral project that requires public buy-in, funding, and patience. The “ordinary citizen” becomes a bridge between an elite institution and a skeptical electorate, a way to translate billion-dollar complexity into a human-scale story.

The subtext is representation as legitimacy. Sending a non-astronaut isn’t merely inspirational; it’s an answer to a question NASA and the White House faced in the 1980s: why keep spending? If a teacher can go, the program reads as safe, routine, and democratically owned. “Experience the excitement” is telling, too. It’s not “conduct experiments” or “advance science,” but excitement - affect as policy, emotion as infrastructure. The representative function matters as much as the mission function.

Context sharpens the irony. McAuliffe speaks as both participant and symbol, recruited to embody America’s self-image: curious, practical, upwardly mobile, unafraid. After Challenger, the sentence can’t help but read differently - as evidence of how thoroughly the shuttle had been marketed as normal. It’s a reminder that in high-stakes technology, the story we tell about risk often becomes part of the risk itself.