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 McAuliffe to investigate the disaster. It determined that the accident was due to a failure of rubber O-rings made by Morton-Thiokol that provided a pressure seal in the aft field joint of the shuttle's right Solid Rocket Booster. The failure of the O-rings was attributed to a design flaw, as their performance could be too easily compromised by factors that included the low temperature on the day of launch. The Commission found that O-ring resiliency is directly related to temperature and due to the low temperature at launch—36 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees lower than the next coldest previous launch—it was