Nearly 40 years ago, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart, killing seven crew members, including Concord High School teacher Christa McAuliffe.
In the years since, the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord has become one major part of McAuliffe’s legacy — both as an astronaut and as a teacher.
Jeanne Gerulskis, former executive director of the museum, remembers its humble beginnings as a small planetarium in the 1990s.
“There was an exhibit that had been put together for the 10th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and it had only meant to be up for like six months,” Gerulskis said. “But it was five years later, and it was still up.”
Gerulskis said she found the display sad, and wanted to find a different way to honor McAuliffe — something that captured what she was like as a person.
“I would want people to focus on how I lived and what I cared about, and the fact that I wanted young people to learn all they could about the universe we live in,” Gerulskis said.
Over the years, the planetarium added new exhibits where kids could learn and climb and have a whole body learning experience.
“Christa McAuliffe was known as the ‘field trip teacher,’ ” Geruliskis said. “And so that's why the people who originally built the first planetarium — what they had in mind was that she wanted all her students to use the world as their classroom.”
But Gerulskis says they were running out of room to keep adding on for visitors. Then, in the summer of 1998, astronaut Alan Shepard, originally from Derry, died.
“We just talked about what would be the best way to memorialize him, and we thought, well, how about a science museum?” Gerulskis said.
Christa McAuliffe was an eighth grader in Framingham, Massachusetts when Shepard became the first American to enter space.
“She was inspired by her fellow New Englander, so their fates were really tied together,” Gerulskis said.
It took years of fundraising, but in 2009, the planetarium reopened as the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. Gerluskis says they wanted visitors to feel inspired to make new discoveries of the world and beyond.
“It just kind of puts your existence into context,” Gerluskis said. “And when they'd get really excited about it, it would just remind me of, oh, yeah, this is why I'm here. I'm here for all these people. I'm here to just get everyone excited about learning.”
Gerulskis retired in 2024, and her effort to honor the legacy of Christa McAuliffe has been passed on to the next generation. Before she retired, the science center unveiled a new addition in that spirit of play and exploration that she finds so inspiring: the Jeanne Gerulskis Science Playground.
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