McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center

The building just ahead holds two of the most extraordinary stories New Hampshire has ever sent into the sky.

On May fifth, nineteen sixty-one, Alan Bartlett Shepard Junior climbed into a capsule called Freedom Seven and became the first American in space. He had grown up in East Derry, about twenty miles south of here, the son of a retired Army colonel, and he spent the nineteen fifties flying Navy test aircraft through what pilots called the envelope. His suborbital flight lasted fifteen minutes. It reached one hundred fifteen miles above the Earth. When he splashed down in the Atlantic, the country had a hero, and the Cold War space race had turned.

Shepad would not stop there. In February of nineteen seventy-one, he commanded Apollo Fourteen and walked on the Moon, becoming the fifth person to do so and, at forty-seven years old, the oldest. Just before climbing back into the lunar module, he produced a collapsible six-iron head he had smuggled aboard, fixed it to a sample-collection handle, and hit two golf balls. With no atmosphere and one-sixth gravity, he declared they went miles and miles. Photographic analysis decades later put the actual distance at under fifty yards, far short of the myth, but the image endured.

Then there is Christa McAuliffe. She was a social studies teacher at Concord High School, twenty minutes from where you are now, when NASA announced the Teacher in Space program in nineteen eighty-four. She applied. More than eleven thousand people applied. On July nineteenth, nineteen eighty-five, Vice President George Bush announced that Sharon Christa McAuliffe would fly on the Space Shuttle Challenger. She planned to teach two lessons from orbit and keep a journal, just as the pioneers she taught her students about had done.

On January twenty-eighth, nineteen eighty-six, Challenger broke apart seventy-three seconds after launch. All seven crew members were killed.

New Hampshire responded by building her a memorial planetarium, opening it in June of nineteen ninety. When Shepard died in nineteen ninety-eight after a battle with leukemia, the state added a wing in his honor, and the renamed McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center expanded again in two thousand nine into a forty-five-thousand-square-foot science museum with an observatory, aviation exhibits, and STEM programs.

Two people from the same small state. One became the first American in space. One tried to bring space into every classroom in the country. This place remembers both.