A witness to Challenger, now comes her turn

A teacher who became an astronaut in 1998 finally gets her chance aboard Endeavour.

By JAMAL THALJI, Times Staff Writer
Published August 8, 2007

Barbara Morgan has waited 22 years for her moment.

In that time, the 55-year-old educator-turned-astronaut has seen firsthand the perils and promise of space flight.

When NASA decided to send teacher Christa McAuliffe into space in 1985, Morgan was her alternate.

She watched from Cape Canaveral a year later, when Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after liftoff.

NASA beckoned again in 1998, this time asking her to become a full-fledged astronaut.

Her first mission was to be aboard Columbia, but it broke apart over Texas during re-entry in 2003.

Now, finally, Morgan is counting down to her first flight, planned for 6:36 this evening aboard space shuttle Endeavour.

If you ask her, she'll say there was hardly any wait at all. Because before she was an astronaut, she was a teacher from Idaho.

"That's what defines teachers -perseverance and patience," the astronaut said. "I'm just doing the job of a teacher."

* * *

In the 1980s, NASA wanted to send an ordinary American to space to help reinvigorate the country's interest in space flight. President Ronald Reagan decided that ordinary American should be a teacher.

More than 11,000 teachers applied for the chance. Two were picked.

The first teacher in space would be Sharon Christa McAuliffe, a high school economics and history teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire. She would broadcast lessons live from space.

Her alternate: Barbara Radding Morgan, who taught third grade at McCall-Donnelly Elementary School in Idaho.

They trained for six months.

After the tragedy on Jan. 28, 1986, Morgan found a new mission: helping comfort the survivors of Challenger's crew.

Thus the two teachers' names were forever linked. In a series of pre-flight interviews held recently at Houston's Johnson Space Center, Morgan was asked again and again about McAuliffe and that day.

"What it was like for me was what it was like for everybody else," Morgan said. "It was horrible."

* * *

After Challenger, Morgan returned to teaching and went on occasional trips across the country as a NASA ambassador.

The space agency grappled with her role as a civilian astronaut, but more so with the aftermath of the Challenger disaster.

The investigation that followed, as Morgan liked to say, was one of those "teachable moments." And that's why she stuck it out with the space program.

"We had kids all over the country watching what adults do in a bad situation," she said, "and I felt it was really important that we show kids that we adults do the right thing and we try very hard to find out what goes wrong and fix it."

By the time NASA invited her back to become a full-fledged astronaut in 1998, Morgan and her husband, Clay, had two sons, one now in college.

* * *

Born in Fresno, Calif., Morgan remembers her first peek at the heavens using her parents' telescope.

Becoming an astronaut back then was incomprehensible. But so was another job: teaching.

"Heaven forbid no," she said. "At that time that was the last thing I wanted to be because in those days it seemed like the only thing girls could be were teachers and nurses."

But public service did interest her. And at Stanford, she was captivated by subjects like physiology of the brain and anthropology of learning.

"It kind of all came back around to being in an environment where people learn and that got me back to thinking about classroom teaching," Morgan said, "and it's the best job I could have chosen."

* * *

Morgan will spend just six hours broadcasting lessons back to earth.

That's because her real mission is to help with the continuing construction of the international space station. Endeavour will deliver a segment of the station and 5,000 pounds of supplies. The job could include four space walks and take 14 days, making it one of the longest shuttle flights ever.

Morgan is the mission loadmaster and will operate the shuttle's robotic arm.

"We could not do this flight if we had a person as a crew member just dedicated to education," said mission commander Scott Kelly. "Barbara is a fully functioning member of this crew and we need her to do shuttle stuff."

Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Jamal Thalji can be reached at thalji@sptimes.com or 727 869-6236.

[Last modified August 8, 2007, 03:02:38]