At midnight on New Years Eve, the 34-person staff of the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center will lose their jobs. Some, but not all of the employees can then be hired back by a newly formed private non-profit organization, which begins operating the recently expanded planetarium on January 1st.
When celebrated Concord resident and high school teacher Christa McAuliffe died in the Challenger explosion in 1986, an out-of-state donor offered $500,000 to build a monument in downtown Concord. As then-mayor Jim MacKay remembers, the city declined. Instead, the state built a planetarium. Today – 26 years after the state opened the McAuliffe Planetarium — […]
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