Challenger's Final Flight Begins Enduring Mission of Inspiration

The tenth flight of Challenger lifts off on Jan. 28, 1986. (NASA)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- As the space shuttle Challenger rose into a cold blue sky over America's Space Coast, excitement for the first teacher to travel into space turned to stunned disbelief as the vehicle suddenly broke apart - a crew lost - in an event which changed both NASA and the nation thirty-two years ago.

The frigid cold weather created a launch pad coated in thick ice which wrapped itself around the fully fueled space shuttle on the morning of January 28, 1986. Challenger's tenth crew, led by commander Francis Dick Scobee, included NASA's Teacher in Space representative, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, on a very publicized mission flying the first average citizen into space.

America's first "teachernaut" planned to conduct two live classroom sessions, including "The Ultimate Field Trip", a tour through the orbiter; and a lesson on why people explore and work in space from 176 miles above. The broadcasts were to be shown in classrooms around the planet on NASA-Select TV. Christa's excitement and enthusiasm made her a popular role model both in the public school systems and with the media.

This shuttle stack was the heaviest to launch weighing 4.53 million pounds, and carrying the second massive Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS). The SPARTAN satellite, designed to be placed over the side of the shuttle for a free flight close study of the popular visit by Haley's Comet, was to be deployed on day three of the mission and retrieved twenty orbits later.

John W Young recalled life from Georgia to Walking on the Moon

John Young gives a Navy salute during a Moon bounce in 1972. (NASA)

He was known as the astronaut's-astronaut.

A depression-era youth who grew up in northwest Georgia to become the seventh man to walk on the moon discussed his life in his recently released autobiography.

As a young boy attending school in Cartersville, located 40 miles north of Atlanta, John W. Young wrote about his meager life in the small town. And, how his strengths carried him on to college and into a flying career with the U.S. Navy and later upward to NASA.

Forever Young: A Life of Adventure in Air and Space is the book on the life of a true American hero, John Watts Young. Co-authored by James R. Hansen, Forever Young puts you on the flight deck and in the cockpit as Young prepares to push America forward in the space race and toward space research.

Young described his father's job at a Cartersville filling station as a temporary one after being laid off from a prominent job as a world traveling civil engineer during the height of the economic collapse.