Launching Together at Annual Conference

Forty years ago, seven families turned the worst day of their lives into an organization built on a simple promise: the mission would continue. Challenger Center exists because the families of Christa McAuliffe, Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, and Gregory Jarvis looked at loss and chose to build something that launches forward instead. Earlier this summer, our nationwide network gathered to celebrate that anniversary at Framingham State University’s Christa McAuliffe Center, a space literally built to carry her name into the next generation.

We came into this Annual Conference 2026 with a theme: Launch Together. The phrase alludes to how we work in all things—just as we challenge kids in our simulated space missions to work with their teammates to solve tough problems, we know collaboration is the only way to reach our organizational mission of inspiring the next generation of explorers and innovators. It’s a motto that goes beyond the conference, though—it has defined how we celebrate our forty years of serving students. 

We’re launching together with our partners, recognizing nonprofits, educational groups, and industry partners for all the support they’ve given us and the impact they’ve had on inspiring students and educators. We’ve launched network-wide celebrations, such as the Follow The Sun Mission, where students in different Centers connected across the country during their missions. We created lesson plans honoring each member of the Challenger crew, acknowledging that none of what we do would be possible without their courageous legacy of exploration.

Launching Together is truly what our Annual Conference is all about. At the end of the day, we aren’t one Center, one keynote, or one milestone: We’re a network, launching together into the next forty years.

After forty years, we are still finding new ways to bring the Challenger crew and their belief in exploration to the next generation and wider world. Nothing made that more real than Thursday night during a special dinner where, joined by friends, family, founding supporters, and Learning Centers from across the country, we took a call from astronauts Charlie Bolden, Kathryn D. Sullivan, and Michael Coats. Each of them knew the members of the Challenger Crew, even trained with them. All of us in attendance were entranced by the stories they told, both hilarious and powerful, about the crew and their own experience training for their missions to space.

It was an awe-inspiring moment for a room full of people who’ve spent their careers trying to make the stars feel reachable for students. Speaking with these legends of space exploration, the mission to inspire the next great explorers felt all the more real.

The entire week was sprinkled with moments that brought us together in how wondrous and important our work is. We felt it when we connected to the International Space Station itself through ARISS, speaking directly with ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot as she passed over Australia. We felt it during a VR launch to the surface of Mars and a planetarium show that made us feel small within the vastness of the cosmos. We felt it again, stepping outside together to watch a partial solar eclipse; I will never forget how the whole conference paused mid-agenda to look up, all tilting our heads back as the Moon passed over part of the Sun. 

Part of Launching Together is finding inspiration together.

Beyond inspiration, this conference was also a celebration of improvements and progress already in motion. More than a dozen Centers have now been trained to deliver our newest Satellite Challenges programming, with another cohort coming soon. Centers across the country shared lessons, from how they’ve augmented programming with VR to how they’ve built new programs, such as STEM-themed escape rooms. Sessions highlighted new tools for continuous improvement, for data collection, and for much more.

Launching Together also means a network collaborating to actively build its next forty years.

We didn’t leave Annual Conference with a tidy conclusion, because forty years isn’t a conclusion, it’s a running start. What we left with was a shared sense that this network doesn’t do its best work in isolation. It does its best work exactly the way we spent three days doing it: together. Whether we’re connecting to inspiring astronauts and leaders in STEM, telling the story of the amazing Challenger crew, or just looking up at the sky, the effect is always more powerful when we do so with our crew.

Forty years down. Here’s to the next forty, launching together.