Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster - Legacy

Legacy

The families of the Challenger crew organized the Challenger Center for Space Science Education as a permanent memorial to the crew. Fifty-two learning centers have been established by this non-profit organization.

An elementary school in Nogales, Arizona, commemorates the accident in name. Challenger Elementary School, and their school motto, "Reach for the sky". In San Diego, California, the next-opened public middle school in the San Diego Unified School District was named Challenger Middle School. The City of Palmdale, the birthplace of the entire shuttle fleet, and its neighbor City of Lancaster, California, both renamed 10th Street East, from Avenue M to Edwards Air Force Base, to Challenger Way in honor of the lost shuttle and its crew. This was the road that the Challenger, Enterprise, and Columbia all were towed along in their initial move from U.S. Air Force Plant 42 to Edwards AFB after completion since Palmdale airport had not yet installed the shuttle crane for placement of an orbiter on the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. In addition, the City of Lancaster has built Challenger Middle School, and Challenger Memorial Hall at the former site of the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds, all in tribute to the Challenger shuttle and crew. The public Peers Park in Palo Alto, California features a "Challenger Memorial Grove" that includes redwood trees grown from seeds carried aboard Challenger in 1985.

In Cocoa, Brevard County, Florida (the county where Cape Canaveral and KSC are located), Challenger 7 Elementary School is named in memory of the seven astronauts who lost their lives. There is also a middle school in neighboring Rockledge, McNair Magnet School, named after astronaut Ronald McNair. A middle school in Boynton Beach, Florida, is named after deceased teacher/astronaut, Christa McAuliffe. There are also schools in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Lenexa, Kansas, named in honor of Christa McAuliffe. The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, a science museum and planetarium in Concord, New Hampshire, is also partly named in her honor. There is also an elementary school in Germantown, Maryland, named after Christa McAuliffe as well as in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The draw bridge over the barge canal on State Rd.3 on Merritt Island, Florida, is named the Christa McAuliffe Memorial Bridge.

In 2004, President George W. Bush conferred posthumous Congressional Space Medals of Honor to all 14 astronauts lost in the Challenger and Columbia accidents.

British heavy metal band TANK has a song in their 1987 album Tank named It fell from the Sky dedicated to the Challenger disaster.