A monument to Ronald McNair, an astronaut who died in the Challenger disaster, stands in his hometown of Lake City, S.C., on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (Photo by Skylar Laird, SC Daily Gazette)
LAKE CITY — Forty years later, Cheryl McNair remembers the shock of watching the Challenger space shuttle fall to pieces with her husband, astronaut Ronald McNair, onboard.
“Now what?” Cheryl McNair, now in her 70s, remembers thinking. “Now that it has happened, now what?”
In the four decades since the first fatal in-flight disaster in NASA’s history, McNair has had to come up with the answer to that question.
On Thursday, the day after the disaster’s 40-year anniversary, McNair, who now lives in Houston, Texas, saw how her husband’s legacy looms large in his hometown of Lake City, inspiring children to pursue careers in science regardless of the barriers that stand in their way, she told the SC Daily Gazette.
During a ceremony honoring Ronald McNair’s life, students at his namesake high school sang, danced, read poems and played a video of science projects that McNair inspired. Their backdrop was a mural of an astronaut and a space shuttle beside the words, “Reach for the stars.”
State Superintendent Ellen Weaver named McNair a “Palmetto Pioneer” on Thursday, making him part of a statewide effort to teach students about underrepresented historical figures integral to South Carolina history. The Department of Education designed a poster with facts about McNair’s life for teachers to display in their classrooms.
“Dr. Ronald McNair’s story belongs in every South Carolina classroom,” Weaver told an audience at the middle school that has roughly 250 students. “I’m pleased to tell you that now it will be.”
Sarah Gay took a bus with her family from South Carolina to Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1986 to see her cousin launched into space.
Ronald McNair, a physicist who specialized in laser research, was one of three mission specialists onboard the shuttle.
The seven-member crew intended to launch a data-collecting satellite and a small spacecraft that would observe Halley’s Comet before rejoining the crew for their trip back to Earth.
This wasn’t McNair’s first trip on the Challenger. Two years prior, he became the second Black American sent into space during an eight-day mission. Along with the research he accomplished, he sent back a photograph of himself playing the saxophone while floating onboard the shuttle.
The Challenger’s 1986 launch faced multiple delays because of cold weather and poor launch conditions. After a week of waiting, Gay, then a senior at Benedict College, told her family she’d already missed too much classwork and needed to get back to Columbia.
Gay was headed back to her dorm after a class when the shuttle finally launched, she told the Gazette.
She didn’t watch the 73 seconds the shuttle spent in the air, nor the moment it became a cloud of white smoke as it collapsed in midair before plummeting into the ocean in pieces.
A friend met Gay at the elevator outside her dorm. “Sarah, the space shuttle blew up,” Gay recalled her friend saying.
“No, it didn’t,” Gay replied. She didn’t believe her friend until they sat down together and watched the replays showing on the news. When Gay finally understood, she and another cousin packed their bags and headed back to Florida to rejoin their family, she said.
Gay may not have watched the disaster, but schoolchildren nationwide did. Onboard the shuttle alongside McNair was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire teacher who planned to conduct several lessons from orbit before traveling the country to tell students about the space program.
McAuliffe won that opportunity in a contest. Thousands of teachers across the country applied after President Ronald Reagan announced NASA’s Teacher in Space Project in August 1984. A year later, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush announced her selection among the finalists. The project accomplished its goal: Students of all ages were newly excited about science and space exploration. But excitement turned to shock with the explosion.
Weaver watched the broadcast with her first grade class.
“It’s the first national tragedy that I can remember,” Weaver said. “I still recall the stunned silence in my first grade classroom, my teacher trying to explain the unexplainable and, later, our president, Ronald Reagan, offering words of comfort and hope that even a child could feel.”
Investigations later found that the cold weather compromised two rubber band-like rings holding the spacecraft’s rocket boosters together, causing it to malfunction soon after takeoff.
All seven members of the crew died, including McNair, who was 35. Along with his wife of 10 years, he left behind a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.
In the aftermath of the disaster, the families of the seven astronauts onboard came together for support. They started to ask themselves and each other: What would the crew have wanted to happen in the aftermath of the disaster?
They would have wanted to inspire children to keep learning, the family members decided. McNair thinks the crew would be glad to see what their work inspired, she said.
Cheryl McNair and other family members formed the Challenger Center, a nonprofit that gives students hands-on lessons in science, technology, engineering and math, often referred to by the abbreviation STEM. The center has 33 learning centers across the country, including one in Columbia.
“It’s something I felt my late husband would have liked, being a scientist, being curious about anything and everything,” McNair said.
Across South Carolina, the aerospace industry has grown with support from the Ronald E. McNair Center for Aerospace Innovation and Research, founded at the University of South Carolina with a donation — and a challenge to lawmakers — by Lake City native Darla Moore. In 2011, she promised to give $5 million for the research center if the Legislature matched her donation in the state budget. Her only requirement: The center must be named for McNair.
In his hometown, a city of 6,500 in Florence County, the impact of his legacy is clear.
A sign on the road leading into town welcomes visitors to his birthplace. A memorial to him, including a statue, a fountain and a mausoleum, stands behind the local library. His name is on roads and the local junior high school.
Gay, now 61, leads the Ronald E. McNair Committee, which is dedicated to telling his story. The committee runs the local museum on McNair’s life.
Born in 1950, McNair grew up without electricity or running water in his childhood home and attended a segregated school.
When he was 9, McNair had the police called on him for trying to check out books about science from the segregated library. He refused to leave without the books and was eventually allowed to take them home.
McNair earned a doctorate degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as MIT. Although he’s best known for the Challenger disaster, he also had a black belt in karate and loved playing the saxophone.
When Jordan Lewis, a biology professor at the University of South Carolina, faced challenges that seemed insurmountable in the moment, he often thought about McNair, who reached such heights in his career despite every obstacle put in front of him.
Lewis participated in the Ronald E. McNair Program at Winthrop University, a federal grant that helps low-income and first-generation college students apply for graduate programs in an effort to encourage more disadvantaged students to seek higher education. With help from the program, Lewis received a doctorate in bioethics.
“I remember thinking, ‘Man, if Ron could do it from Lake City in the ‘60s, I can for sure get to work in Orangeburg today,’” Lewis said.
“But even more, who he was as a person inspired that I could be a scientist and still be cool, because how much cooler can you get than playing a saxophone while floating in zero Gs in space?” Lewis added.
McNair’s mother always said her son would one day return to his hometown to inspire the children there, his wife said.
Thursday morning, with McNair’s face beaming down from one of the walls of the school’s gymnasium on the students celebrating his life, Cheryl McNair felt like he’d accomplished that goal.
“This, I think, did it,” Cheryl McNair said of Thursday’s ceremony. “This did it very well.”
