Heading home from the cape, some of Concord's third-graders stopped for hamburgers in Orlando. One asked, "Well, if there was an accident, when will they come back?" Concord, nestled by New Hampshire's Merrimack River, is one of the nation's smallest state capitals (pop. 30,400). Linked like the rest of the world by the searing television images, the whole city seemed to stiffen in sorrow. Said Pharmacy Clerk Timothy Shurtleff: "People froze in their tracks." A local radio station began playing mourning music. "It's like part of the family has been killed," said Barbara Underwood, who had been watching at the library. The townspeople were not alone. The vivacious McAuliffe had come to embody each schoolteacher that any American has ever admired.

In Washington, Ronald Reagan was getting ready to brief network-TV correspondents about his State of the Union address, scheduled for that evening. He was startled when several officials involved in the preparations burst into the Oval Office. "There's been a serious incident with the space shuttle," said Vice President George Bush. National Security Adviser John Poindexter echoed what he had just heard on TV: "A major malfunction." Communications Director Pat Buchanan got to the point: "Sir, the shuttle has exploded." Reagan stood up. "How tragic," he said. Then he asked, "Is that the one the schoolteacher was on?" While NASA had proposed sending a private citizen into space, it was the President who had decided that a teacher should be first.

When asked about the State of the Union speech, Reagan replied, "There could be no speech without mentioning this. But you can't stop governing the nation because of a tragedy of this kind. So, yes, one will continue." Leaders on Capitol Hill, however, immediately sensed the incongruity of an upbeat national address at such a time. House Republican Leader Robert Michel telephoned Chief of Staff Donald Regan to urge a delay. Regan phoned House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole. Both strongly advised a postponement, and the White House agreed. Spokesman Larry Speakes announced that the address would wait a week, until this Tuesday.

Instead, Reagan delivered a poignant and graceful televised tribute to "the Challenger Seven" late Tuesday afternoon. "They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths," he said. "They wished to serve, and they did--they served all of us." Addressing himself directly to the nation's schoolchildren who had been watching, Reagan added, "I know it's hard to understand that 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."

On Capitol Hill, Speaker O'Neill recessed the House and, shaking his head, could only mutter, "Terrible thing. Terrible thing." He issued a statement expressing his awe of the space pioneers: "We salute those who died performing exploits that people my age grew up reading about in comic books."

Utah Republican Jake Garn, a former Navy pilot and the first civilian official to go into space (aboard the shuttle Discovery last April), could barely speak. "These were my friends," he said. "Mike Smith was my mother hen." Smith had been specifically assigned to help ready Garn for his flight. Garn explained that all the astronauts were fully aware of the risks. "We never talked about it. We always assumed that if it happened, it would happen to somebody else." Recalled Ohio Democrat John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth: "We used to speculate, the first group of seven, how many of us would be alive after the program." (One of them, Gus Grissom, died in a 1967 fire on a launch pad.) His voice thick, he added, "We always knew there would be a day like this. We're dealing with speeds and powers and complexities we've never dealt with before. This was a day we wish we could kick back forever."

Glenn was among those space experts who had argued that the shuttle program should be devoted solely to research and that only experts who could contribute to that purpose should occupy the limited spots available on the hugely expensive flights. But after a highly successful series of missions in 1983, James Beggs, the NASA administrator, decided that the time was ripe to select a "citizen observer-participant." One clear aim: to build broader public support for the funding of the shuttles.

After Reagan told a group of students and teachers in August 1984 that he wanted a teacher to be first, more than 11,000 applied. NASA officials felt that a key quality for the winner was the ability to articulate the values of space exploration. McAuliffe, who came across as a public relations natural, survived all the screening at Johnson Space Center. At a White House ceremony with the ten finalists last July 19, Bush announced that she was the winner. She would carry only "one body," into space, McAuliffe said happily, but the "ten souls" of all the finalists would be riding with her.

After training for three months, the teacher and her more experienced crewmates were ready for their multiple mission. McAuliffe's task was to ! conduct two 15-minute classes in space as millions of schoolchildren watched via closed-circuit TV. In one, called "The ultimate field trip," she would conduct a tour of the spacecraft, explaining the duties of each crew member and the facilities on board. The second, titled "Where we've been, where we're going, why?," would stress the scientific, commercial and industrial benefits that have been derived from space travel. The other specialists on Challenger had less publicized but important goals. The mission carried a $100 million NASA satellite, the second in a series designed to fill the communications gaps that now exist between orbiting spacecraft and ground stations. Among the experiments the crew was scheduled to conduct was the deployment of instruments that would measure the ultraviolet spectrum of Halley's comet. Another was to sample radiation within the spacecraft at various orbit points. There was even a student project in which the effect of weightlessness on the development of twelve White Leghorn chicken embryos would be studied.

All those laudable projects vanished, of course, with Challenger's demise. But it was the loss of the seven humans, the realization that shuttle flights involve much more than a wondrous display of mechanical and electronic wizardry, that set off spontaneous expressions of grief across the U.S.

In Atlanta, Tuesday afternoon was sunny, but motorists switched on their car headlights as a tribute. In Los Angeles, the Olympic torch atop the Memorial Coliseum was lighted anew in honor of the space victims. Governor James Thompson of Illinois, before leaving on a trip to Japan, had asked citizens of his state to turn on their porch lights at night during Challenger's mission to express support for the teacher-in-space project. After the tragedy, he telephoned a request that they keep them on Wednesday night as memorials to the fallen heroes. Many other communities paid comparable tributes. The floodlights that normally bathe New York City's Empire State Building in bright colors were darkened. Residents of Harlem petitioned Mayor Ed Koch to name a street after black Astronaut Ronald McNair, whose father once operated an auto shop on East 96th Street. All along the Florida coast, from Jacksonville to Miami, some 20,000 people pointed flashlights skyward on Friday night.