Challenger Memorial Rose Garden
Near Dundee, Oregon
This rose garden honors the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which broke apart seventy-three seconds into flight on January twenty-eighth, nineteen eighty-six. All seven crew members were lost: commander Francis Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, and Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis. The seventh was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire schoolteacher selected to be the first civilian in space.
Her words are often remembered: "I touch the future. I teach." The garden stands as a quiet neighborhood memorial, planting beauty in the ground of grief and keeping the names of those seven alive in a city that paused, like the rest of the country, on that January morning.
