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Nasa was in talks with Sesame Street Producers to have Caroll Spinney be aboard the challenger and film segments as his famous character, Big Bird. The plan was thrown out because the suit wouldn't be able to fit inside the shuttle and Spinney was replaced by McAuliffe. I think that would be an interesting part of the page. MrCboY1997 (talk) 14:53, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If you've got reliable sources for that, you're welcome to add it. NekoKatsun (nyaa) 17:25, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It has been a bit of time since I was working on this article, but I remember not being able to find reliable sources for the Big Bird anecdote, but read about it in forum posts and the like. That being said, I don't think it was a 1-for-1 swap between Big Bird and McAuliffe; I think the idea was that NASA planned to do more outreach using citizen-astronauts, starting with Teacher in Space, but plans were scrapped after the Challenger Disaster. This story wouldn't merit an entire paragraph/subsection. Balon Greyjoy (talk) 19:50, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Having done a bit of research after this came up, looks like the initial plan was indeed more citizen-astronauts - there were fairly solid plans for at least one reporter that I could find. Big Bird, however, seems to have gotten no further than "hey, this would be neat". I found reference to NASA contacting the producers asking if they thought this would be neat too, and they seem to have agreed, but there's nothing beyond that. I wouldn't call it "in talks," certainly. If we added a reference to this to the article, I'd suggest merely saying that NASA had expressed interest in having Big Bird fly on a shuttle mission - but to be honest, I don't think it belongs on the page that's specifically about the catastrophic launch. NekoKatsun (nyaa) 15:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
level-5 vital article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
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