Christa McAuliffe

Fire takes four of her ten planets, with two apiece in earth, air and water, and nothing is missing from the balance. Not one of the ten was retrograde, which is uncommon. Four of them sit in the last three degrees of a sign, and a fifth, Uranus, had crossed into Cancer five arcminutes earlier, so half the chart was within touching distance of changing sign on the day she was born. The record says McAuliffe was a high school teacher selected from eleven thousand applicants to be the first teacher in space, and that she died with six others when Challenger broke up seventy three seconds after launch.

The site's reading of a Virgo Sun is an identity built on doing something properly and being useful, with genuine skill and modesty about it. Selection from eleven thousand applicants is the record's own measure of the skill. Mercury sits in quiet contact with Saturn at under half a degree, structured thinking without strain, glossed as organisation, patience and long concentration, and in a school teacher those three words are closer to a job description than to a character insight. That is worth saying before anybody mistakes the fit for a finding.

Mars sits in easy contact with Uranus at seven tenths of a degree, and the reading is quick reflexes, acting well in an emergency, and an instinct for the unconventional move. That reading is not available here, and refusing it explicitly is better than leaving it out quietly. The record's second sentence is a vehicle that broke up seventy three seconds after launch and killed seven people. Nothing about reflexes applies to a structural failure at that speed, and no arrangement of planets contains it, predicted it or bears on it.

Her Moon sits on the twenty ninth degree of Leo at noon with Virgo still possible, so it is left out, and the tightest contact in the chart goes with it, along with the only group of planets it had in one sign. What remains is a chart with nothing absent from its elements, nothing retrograde and nothing extreme in it, which is a plainer result than most entries here report and is reported plainly for that reason. She died at Cape Canaveral on 28 January 1986, at thirty seven. Mars stood square her natal Saturn at under seven tenths of a degree that day and Venus in easy contact with her natal Neptune at nine tenths. The Moon was full and ninety two per cent lit.