Her parents worked with Framingham State College to establish the McAuliffe Center. Her husband Steven J. McAuliffe remarried and in 1992 became a federal judge, serving with the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire in Concord. Her son, Scott, completed graduate studies in marine biology, and her daughter, Caroline, went on to pursue the same career as her mother: teaching. On July 23, 2004, she and all the other 13 astronauts lost in both the "Challenger" and "Columbia" disasters were posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President George W. Bush.