Christa McAuliffe Vice President George H. W. Bush announced that she had been selected for the position. Another teacher, Barbara Morgan, served as her backup. According to Mark Travis of the "Concord Monitor", it was her manner that set her apart from the other candidates. NASA official Alan Ladwig said "she had an infectious enthusiasm", and NASA psychiatrist Terrence McGuire told "New Woman" magazine that "she was the most broad-based, best-balanced person of the 10." Later that year, she and Morgan each took a year-long leave of absence from teaching in order to train for a space shuttle mission in early 1986.
Christa Wolf protagonist dies of leukemia. This work demonstrates the dangers and consequences that happen to an individual when they internalize society's contradictions. In "Accident", the narrator's brother is undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor a few days after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster had occurred. In 2004 she edited and published her correspondence with her UK-based near namesake Charlotte Wolff over the years 1983–1986 (Wolf, Christa and Wolff, Charlotte (2004) "Ja, unsere Kreise berühren sich: Briefe", Luchterhand Munich). Wolf died 1 December 2011 in Berlin, where she had lived with her husband, . She was buried on 13 December 2011 in