In the communities where the crew members were raised or lived, friends and family members gathered to try to draw meaning from the tragedy. Seven black ( balloons were released at Framingham State College in Massachusetts, where McAuliffe had earned her bachelor of arts degree. A memorial service in the college auditorium on Thursday afternoon was attended by her parents, holding hands in the front row, and more than 1,000 friends, faculty and students. "Christa McAuliffe is infinite because she is in our hearts," said Charles Sposato, a Framingham high school teacher. At Temple Israel in Akron, Governor Richard Celeste of Ohio told Judy Resnik's parents and friends, "She knew she would be at home in space. And she was. And she is." At North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where Ron McNair studied physics, the choir sang old spirituals, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a fellow alumnus, told the congregation that McNair "belongs to the ages now."

On Saturday the sad sound of bugles blowing taps rolled across the site from which the astronauts had climbed so joyfully, but so briefly, into the air. Employees of the Kennedy Space Center held a memorial service near the stands where the schoolchildren had watched the lift-off. A helicopter then carried a wreath of white chrysanthemums and seven red carnations two miles out to sea and dropped them into the gray water.

Almost immediately, sympathetic Americans moved to create a wide variety of memorial funds. One group of Washington attorneys and bankers set up a trust to provide for the children of the crew members; among those who pledged donations were kindergarten classes in Florida and Maine, two California songwriters and a bank in Hawaii. (The McAuliffe family is already the beneficiary of a $1 million life insurance policy, donated before the accident by a Washington, insurance brokerage company.) The National Education Association began to collect for a program that will seek to honor McAuliffe by financing "pioneering" projects by teachers as well as scholarships to encourage gifted people to enter the profession. And school children around the country began sending nickels and dimes to NASA to help replace the shuttle, which will cost an estimated $2 billion. (NASA says it will decide later how to use the contributions.)

On Capitol Hill, Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Arlen Specter asked President Reagan to name one of the Education Department's buildings after McAuliffe so that "her sacrifice will live forever in the memory of this nation." New York's Democratic Congressman Gary Ackerman introduced legislation to designate Jan. 28 of each year as a permanent National Teacher Recognition Day. Florida's Democratic Congressman Bill Nelson, who, like Garn, had flown on a shuttle, proposed that seven of the newly discovered moons of the planet Uranus each be named for one of Challenger's victims. Colorado Republican William Armstrong went a bit further, asking the Senate to name ten moons, adding the three Apollo astronauts who died in the 1967 launch-pad tragedy as well. Democratic Representative Mickey Leland of Texas urged that the "true heroes" all be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, a photo of Challenger's crew, draped in black ribbon, was placed beside a 12- ft.-high model of the shuttle. The museum kept running a film, narrated by Walter Cronkite, with scenes of Judy Resnik and Dick Scobee on previous space missions. The documentary is called The Dream Is Alive.

For Jay Schaeffer of Belmont High School in Los Angeles, personal gestures caught the national mood. Schaeffer had been one of the teacher semifinalists in the competition to lift off on Challenger, and despite the disaster, he still yearns for a flight. "I would go today, right now. I wouldn't even go home to change," he said. But he appreciated the students who gently touched his shoulder on Tuesday. "It was an affirmation of life." For students, he explained, "a teacher in space becomes their teacher. Do you know an astronaut? Everyone knows a teacher."

America's agony drew widespread sympathy around the world. In Moscow, a somber TV announcer spoke factually about the disaster as videotapes of the aborted flight were broadcast throughout the Soviet Union. American music, including old Glenn Miller recordings, were broadcast on radio. Soviet Party Chief Mikhail Gorbachev quickly joined the multitude of world leaders who sent condolences to President Reagan. "We partake of your grief at the tragic death of the crew of the space shuttle Challenger," he said.

Surprisingly, the Soviet newspaper Socialist Industry reported that Soviet officials had decided to name two craters on the planet Venus in honor of McAuliffe and Resnik. The Soviets had discovered the craters via space probes. Only the women among the American space victims were selected because the Soviets respect the view in Roman mythology that Venus is the goddess of beauty. Several Soviet cosmonauts sent a collective note of sympathy directly to NASA. Soviet citizens seemed to share the sentiment. "When something like this happens," said a Moscow factory worker named Yelena, "we are neither Russians nor Americans. We all just feel sorry for those who died and for their families."

Only later did the Soviet press begin to carp that capitalist competitiveness had been responsible for undue haste in U.S. space projects. Komsomolskaya Pravda charged that the accident showed the frailty of Reagan's antimissile Star Wars program and asked, "What if lack of caution, a technical defect or sheer chance should bring the world an unforeseen nuclear war?"

At the Vatican, Pope John Paul II asked an audience of thousands to pray for the American astronauts. He said that the tragedy had "provoked deep sorrow in my soul." In Buenos Aires, Cartoonist Dobal used his space in the Clarin to write, "I can't give you a joke because, dear reader, all my space is filled with infinite pain." Japan's public TV extended its popular 45- minute evening news program to an hour and devoted it all to the space accident. The Jerusalem Post noted editorially that "Americans take their risks in front of grandstands and television cameras for all the world to see, while the Soviets prefer to keep their launchings secret until they have been successful." Alan Castro, a former newspaper editor in Hong Kong, expressed a common new awareness of space travel prompted by the accident: "For a while there, we lost sight of the man in our fixation with the machine." Toronto's Globe and Mail pointed to the "harsh lesson that glory and adventure often go hand in hand with danger and death." On a visit to the north of Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher observed, "New knowledge sometimes demands sacrifices of the bravest and the best. I just felt we saw the spirit of America and the spirit of the American people."