Dr. June Scobee Rodgers stands in front of a poster of the Challenger crew, including her late husband, Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, at the UTC Challenger STEM Learning Center.
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will always remain closely linked to the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded 40 years ago on Jan. 28, 1986.
Dr. June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger Commander Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, serves as founding chair of Challenger Center, a STEM-education nonprofit organization.
While there was no UTC representation on board the shuttle, its memory lives on at the UTC Challenger STEM Learning Center, which was the first center to be located on a University campus.
The UTC Challenger Center launched in 1994 and was the first to be located on a University campus. Rodgers’ goal was to continue pursuing the mission’s overall objective of highlighting education.
Rodgers recalled working with former Congresswoman Marilyn Lloyd to build the center in the early 1990s.
“With her leadership and that of so many others here in Chattanooga, we brought a board of directors together and started working on it, and there was tremendous interest,” she said. “School districts were interested, and the city government and county government came together with matching grants to help with the seed money to get started.
“Then many, many other local companies and national organizations helped, and off it went. I’m most proud of it because I’m here and I put my heart into creating it.”
Resident Space Educator Bill Floyd remembers the day in 1986, while working at the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant for TVA as a mechanical engineer.
“Afterwards, you had the families sitting there and trying to look at the tragedy, who are going to have to live with it, but what are you going to make good out of it?” Floyed recalled asking. “That was their big concentration—almost immediately turning it around to make it one of the best schooling events you could ever put in front of school kids. From a tragedy, we’ve got to give them the chance to come in and role-play as astronauts.”
Rodgers said education became their renewed mission because it was Christa McAuliffe’s reason for being on the flight. McAuliffe, a social studies teacher, was selected to fly in space.
“We believed that education opens the door to so many possibilities. It increases the horizon for individuals to know about the possibilities of their future,” she said. “It is what the Challenger crew was all about: education. They were, you could say, our North Star guiding us. We knew that NASA would continue space flight, but we wanted to continue the education mission.”
Rodgers explained that it’s rewarding to see children find a passion for learning at centers across the country.
“It’s so rewarding to see the children in action here and to imagine that these seven people are looking down and saying, ‘Oh, the mission really continues,’” Rodgers said. “These kids are doing what we loved, and a tremendous acknowledgement must go to the educators who bring their students.”
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UTC Challenger STEM Learning Center
