"Thirty-one years ago tomorrow - January 28, 1986 - seven brave American astronauts boarded the space shuttle named 'Challenger.' They were:
Francis Scobee
Michael Smith
Ronald McNair
Ellison Onizuka
Judith Resnik
Gregory Jarvis
and Christa McAuliffe from Concord, New Hampshire who was a history teacher at Concord High School and would have been the first school teacher in space.
Because of a defect in the rocket booster, the shuttle did not make it beyond our hemisphere. There were no survivors.
Many people watched this flight, and then heard President Ronald Reagan's address to the nation where he spoke the following words:
'And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.'
Let us stand now for a moment of silence in honor of the crew of the space shuttle called Challenger."
Chorus 2A-1 sang "America the Beautiful"