21 years after Challenger, a teacher gets her shot
A backup for Christa McAuliffe Barbara Morgan is finally getting her chance.
Aug. 1, 2007 — -- By age 33, Barbara Morgan had taught school on an Indian reservation in the Rockies and in Ecuador's capital in the Andes. That did not quiet her longing for a classroom higher in the sky.
"I want to go on the space shuttle," Morgan wrote to NASA in 1985, applying to be the first teacher in orbit. "I want to get some stardust on me."
Her enthusiasm impressed NASA, but it picked high school teacher Christa McAuliffe instead, and Morgan as her backup. McAuliffe never made it to orbit: On Jan. 28, 1986, space shuttle Challenger exploded just after liftoff, killing McAuliffe and six crewmates.
Next week, Morgan, now 55, finally gets her chance at some stardust. On Tuesday, she is scheduled to blast off on her first spaceflight -- and America's first effort since Challenger to put a teacher in orbit.
NASA is playing down the flight's symbolism, and the impact of any teaching Morgan will do could be muted because most schools are on summer break. But her flight could give the space agency a public-relations boost at a time when it has been plagued by problems.
The breakup of shuttle Columbia in 2003 killed seven astronauts and raised questions about whether the shuttle program should continue. It eventually led the Bush administration to set NASA on a course to land on the moon again -- and, later, Mars -- using a new spacecraft.
This year, NASA has had to deal with an embarrassing astronaut love triangle, a computer meltdown on the International Space Station and a report from a panel probing astronauts' health that said unidentified astronauts drank heavily just before a launch on two occasions.
In a sense, Morgan's flight will be a reminder of a less complicated time at NASA, when shuttles had been flying for less than five years and McAuliffe's plan to make Challenger a satellite classroom for students across the nation reflected the program's educational ambitions.
In the years after Challenger, NASA's concerns about the shuttle's safety kept it from sending another teacher —
