Here they are, that first crew. If you want to know the history of the Christa McAuliffe Space Center then your search starts in room 18 at Central Elementary School, Pleasant Grove Utah. It was early spring of 1983. I was student teaching in Mr Mike Thompson's 6th grade classroom. Space was the next science unit. I wanted to do something different - something that would stand out. Enough of the textbook. Carl Sagan's Cosmos was on TV. He taught space by taking you on a pretend journey to the wonders of the universe in a makebelieve starship.
Inspired by Carl Sagan and the imagination of Gene Roddenbury's Star Trek, I wrote the space unit. The classroom's blinds were pulled down, the desks rearranged in a semicircle and detailed with posterboard handdrawn controls, and we ventured forth into the Cosmos with one theme to guide us onward......
That statement "Somewhere, somethng incredible is waiting to be known" from Carl Sagan was what you would call today my 'mission statement'. And with that mission statement as a guide I started the Young Astronauts Club at Central...
"From small things big things one day come." Our big thing is the Space Center and the many Center's and programs which have come from it.
I salute those first young astronauts, their names memoralized on the back of a class photo 37 years old...
Today they are 49 years old. Their children, and now grandchildren, have visited and will visit the Space Center. How fun it must be for them to tell the story of that first starship journey so many years ago.
Mr. Williamson
"Tex"
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