Big Bird Was Supposed to Fly on the Space Shuttle?
If it weren't for the 1985 Teacher in Space program, Big Bird might've died aboard Challenger.
For many Americans and non-Americans that followed NASA’s Space Shuttle launches in the 1980s, the morning of Tuesday, January 28, 1986, still remains a visceral memory. At 11.39 a.m. EST, Space Shuttle Challenger turned into a fireball and disintegrated above the Atlantic Ocean. A highly anticipated and publicised mission that saw Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from New Hampshire fly aboard the Shuttle and become the first civilian in space ended tragically only 73 seconds after lift-off. However, had the initial planning been kept and the beloved Sesame Street character sent up in the Shuttle, history might’ve been different.
Before President Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space program in early 1985, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) was struggling to keep the nation interested in what it did. So, shortly after the Shuttle became operational in July of 1982, NASA started thinking of how to reinvigorate the nation’s curiosity in their brand-new space program. NASA was especially interested in targeting children to increase their interest in the agency’s work. And what better way to do so than by sending a beloved Muppet to space?
Caroll Spinney, Big Bird’s puppeteer, was contacted by NASA and asked whether he’d be interested in participating in a Shuttle mission as the first ordinary citizen in space. Although Spinney showed interest in the matter, NASA engineers soon discovered that fitting an 8 feet Big Bird costume into the crew compartment and assuring safety during flight, mission and reentry was an impossible feat. Therefore, although NASA confirmed in 2015 that Big Bird’s space journey was their initial plan for rekindling the nation’s spark for space travel, the plan eventually fell through and the agency found another solution by sending a teacher to space.
Turning to the hypotheticals, what if Big Bird flew and died aboard Challenger? First and foremost, that means Christa McAuliffe would have remained an obscure teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. She would probably have continued her quiet and hard-working life of a teacher, loving mother and wife.
What would that mean for Big Bird? Not only would the explosion of the Challenger be the death of Caroll Spinney, the Muppet’s puppeteer, but of Big Bird, too. There is no doubt that even more children would have been following the launch and mission had the Muppet been part of the crew. That inevitably leads us to conclude that children following both the launch and the show would have been traumatised even more, knowing a beloved character had just been killed before their eyes.
In conclusion, the fact Big Bird was even being considered as a potential candidate to fly to space is astonishing, and also a really cool fun fact to share when you’ve run out of topic ideas on a first date, especially if you don’t want to see them again. Altogether, the loss of Challenger proved to be a big hit to NASA’s image that the agency never saw coming. Having lost 6 professional astronauts and one civilian, the agency’s future was uncertain and we can only imagine how tarnished their reputation would’ve been had they killed the much adored Muppet.