Early Life
Born Sharon Christa Corrigan in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of the five children of Edward Christopher Corrigan (1922–1990)—an accountant—and Grace Mary Corrigan (née George), a substitute teacher, she was of Lebanese descent. McAuliffe's mother is of Maronite Lebanese origin through her father (McAuliffe's grandfather), and is a niece of Lebanese-American historian Philip Khuri Hitti. McAuliffe was known by the name "Christa" from an early age, although in later years she signed her name "S. Christa Corrigan", and eventually "S. Christa McAuliffe".
The year that McAuliffe was born, her father was completing his sophomore year at Boston College. Not long thereafter, he took a job as an assistant comptroller in a Boston department store, and the family moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, where Christa attended and graduated from Marian High School in 1966. As a youth, she was inspired by Project Mercury and the Apollo moon landing program. The day after John Glenn orbited the Earth in Friendship 7, she told a friend at Marian High: "Do you realize that someday people will be going to the Moon? Maybe even taking a bus, and I want to do that!" She wrote years later on her NASA application form: "I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate."
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