McAuliffe dollar in 2021

Apparently sales of the Christa McAuliffe coins have not done too well and Dean Kamen, the promoter, is unhappy.

From the New Hampshire Union Leader:
Dean Kamen issues 'call to action' to promote coins honoring Christa McAuliffe.
Dean Kamen is flummoxed. Flabbergasted, even.

Article:
https://www.unionleader.com/news/ed...cle_2f0733e9-8a69-54a4-9a14-f40b439abbaa.html

 

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It was widely expected that these wouldnt be very popular. Many people if not most people especially collectors believe the whole crew should be honored not just her. If they wanted to do individuals there should have been one for all of them which of course wasnt allowed by law.

They can promote it all they want, it's not going to make any significant sales difference

 

Can't read the bloody article without a pop-up wanting me to subscribe to the paper. Most annoying.

I think they should make a coin honoring Molly Pitcher. Now there was a brave Lass.

 

The coin doesn't do much for me and I find it rather morbid. I remember exactly where I was, sitting at my desk, listening to the launch on the radio. It was massively hyped, regular teacher in space and all that, and Reagan was giving a state of the union speech that night. The disaster sucked the life out of the US space program and I don't think it's ever been the same since.

 

As @baseball21 stated, the entire crew of the Challenger should have been honored. The powers that be decided it was only appropriate to honor the teacher. Lousy decision on their part. The poor sales of the coin are proving it. I made my decision not to purchase the moment it was announced CM was the only one being recognized. Apparently I wasn't the only one to make that decision.

 

There's just no way around the fact that its a boring design for a subject that doesnt drive interest and many people feel like its diminishing the loss of the rest of the crew. I realize they had the stars on the reverse for the others but if you just show someone they wouldnt think twice about them. There's just not many modern commen series collectors left so things have to have good designs as well as a topic to get people excited or the sales are very weak. If they had at the very least done a reverse that was much more for the whole crew it probably would have done better.

 

Flummoxed and flabbergasted that this is a flop? Fool.

 

He should be happy that it has sold better than most of the commem dollars for the past three years. Sold more of just the proofs so far than all of last years Womens Suffrage dollars, proof and Unc. You want a real poor seller look at this years National Law Enforcement dollar. So far 33,441 proofs, and just 7,994 Uncirculated out of an authorization of 400,000.

 

We don't call it the Christa McAuliffe explosion/disaster. We call it the Challenger explosion/disaster.

The cynic in me says that if you want to make this EDUCATIONAL:

A) You ought to have the Challenger blowing up on the obverse, and on the reverse (the big explosion was courtesy of the liquid hydrogen tank blowing up), the chemical symbols:

2H2 + O2 + heat = 2H2O + energy

or (B) maybe on the obverse a picture of the crew with their last names around the perimeter, with, on the reverse, the logo "Incompetent Management" with a picture of the Challenger blowing up.

 

Gotta have an O-ring on there somewhere. I never heard so much about O-rings in my life. Didn't even know they existed.