One Year - 1986: The Ultimate Field Trip
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2022
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’ve got something special for you this Labor Day: an episode from the new season of Slate’s narrative history podcast One Year. Evan Chung tells the story of the American teachers who competed for an unprecedented prize: a spot on the January 1986 launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Three of the finalists describe the grueling selection process and the tragedy that killed one of their own.
One Year is produced by Evan Chung, Sophie Summergrad, Sam Kim, Madeline Ducharme, and Josh Levin.
Derek John is Sr. Supervising Producer of Narrative Podcasts and Merritt Jacob is Sr. Technical Director.
Slate Plus members get to hear more about the making of One Year. Get access to extra episodes, listen to the show without any ads, and support One Year by signing up for Slate Plus for just $15 for your first three months.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, this is Mary Wilson, producer for What Next? And we've got something special for you this Labor Day, an episode from the new season of Slate's narrative history podcast, One Year. One Year explores the people and the struggles that changed America one year at a time. The new season looks back at 1986. If you know anything about 1986, it might be the space shuttle |
| 0:22.4 | challenger explosion, but few people remember what led up to that moment. Today, you'll hear |
| 0:28.2 | the story of NASA's Teacher in Space program, told through the eyes of three finalists who |
| 0:33.8 | competed for a seat aboard the Challenger. They described the grueling selection process and the tragedy that killed one of their own. |
| 0:42.7 | Be sure to subscribe to One Year to hear their entire season on 1986. |
| 0:46.8 | We'll be back with a new episode of What Next Tomorrow? |
| 0:49.3 | But for now, here's one-year host, Josh Levine. |
| 0:52.6 | Hey, this is Josh Levine, the host of One Year. |
| 0:55.8 | I hope you're enjoying our season on 1986. |
| 0:59.2 | This week, we have a story from senior producer Evan Chung. |
| 1:03.5 | About halfway through Ronald Reagan's first term as president, the country got an unexpected |
| 1:09.1 | warning. |
| 1:09.7 | President Reagan and the American people were told this today. |
| 1:13.9 | The educational foundations of our country are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity |
| 1:20.7 | that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. |
| 1:24.9 | Those words came from a report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education. |
| 1:30.3 | It was called a nation at risk, and it was a chilling look at the state of the country's schools. |
| 1:36.2 | American kids were incapable of solving math problems or writing essays. |
| 1:41.2 | On all sorts of academic tests, they were placing dead last among industrialized nations. |
| 1:46.4 | If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America this mediocre educational |
| 1:51.8 | performance, they wrote, we might have viewed it as an act of war. The commission called for |
| 1:57.4 | an immediate increase in federal funding. Reagan wasn't having it. |
... |
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