For astronaut, 'class is now in session'

Endeavour carries a teacher into space.

By JAMAL THALJI, Times Staff Writer
Published August 9, 2007

Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off from launch pad 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission, transporting parts for the International Space Station and carrying educator astronaut Barbara Morgan, is the first flight for Endeavour since December 2002.
	[Getty Images]

CAPE CANAVERAL - The countdown for Barbara Morgan started at T-minus 22 years. It ended at 6:36 p.m. Wednesday.

That's when the teacher-turned astronaut roared into space aboard space shuttle Endeavour, more than two decades after watching fellow teacher Christa McAuliffe and six other friends perish aboard Challenger.

"For Barbara Morgan and her crewmates, class is now in session," said Rob Navias, the voice of Houston's Mission Control, as the external fuel tank separated nine minutes into launch.

It was a smooth, nearly routine launch to continue construction of the international space station. Endeavour's 20th mission saw NASA's youngest shuttle - first launched on a satellite rescue mission 15 years ago - race into space at the tip of a blinding trail and a plume of bright smoke painted against the backdrop of blue summer skies.

But Morgan, the 55-year-old mother of two who started astronaut training nine years ago, won't just be teaching from space. The former elementary school teacher is a key part of a complicated mission that could last as long as two weeks and see as many as four spacewalks.

As the mission's loadmaster she will spend time behind the controls of the shuttle's robotic arm as the crew installs a new truss, delivers hardware and supplies, and repairs a broken gyroscope.

Shuttle flight also seemed routine in the 1980s when Morgan and McAuliffe were selected for NASA's old teacher-in-space program out of more than 11,000 applicants. Morgan was McAuliffe's backup. After Challenger disintegrated in 1986 Morgan returned to Idaho to teach and raise a family. Then NASA called her back to duty, but not as a teacher - as an astronaut.

Morgan has said time and again that she is not finishing the mission of McAuliffe and the crew of Challenger - she's continuing it. But she hoped that Endeavour would serve as a reminder of Challenger's mission.

As for making history, Morgan said somebody already beat her to it. "I am not the first teacher in space and never will be," she said in preflight interviews in Houston. "Christa McAuliffe is, was and always will be the first teacher in space and that is her honor."

The families of several Challenger astronauts were on hand for Wednesday's launch. Yet NASA officials did their best to downplay the connections between Challenger and Endeavour, between Morgan and McAuliffe.

"It's wonderful for me to see us get Barbara up into orbit," said launch integration manager LeRoy Cain, "as it is with all of the crew."

But there are some stories not even NASA can downplay. There's the February arrest of an astronaut accused of trying to kidnap a romantic rival, an employee for a subcontractor who is accused of sabotaging a station component for this mission and most recently a report that two astronauts were cleared for shuttle flight despite being intoxicated.

So far the space agency has reviewed the past 10 years of shuttle and Soyuz flights and no such incidents have come to light, NASA administrator Mike Griffin said. That review is continuing.

"It's not, to me, credible charges," said the agency's top official. "But that said, if it were to be true, it's extremely serious and I take it as my responsibility to find out.

"The public image I want people to have of NASA is that when something unpleasant comes up, (we) take it, and deal with it, head on."

But Griffin bristled at the notion that Morgan's presence on board Endeavour had heightened public, and media, interest in this launch. Griffin said he finds every launch, and every mission to space, interesting.

[Last modified August 8, 2007, 23:22:29]