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After 21 years, STS-118 will carry “Teacher in Space” Barbara Morgan
By Matthias Gründer
Once upon a time she was just a teacher who had been trained to deliver a few hours' teaching from space. Today Barbara Morgan has the title of Educator Astronaut and is about to lose her reputation as the one who was always just the backup.
All her life up to now Barbara Morgan wanted just to be a teacher, to accompany small primary school children on the difficult, but exciting path to the world of knowledge. She had begun her professional career in an Indian reservation in Arlee, Montana, where she taught the little ones reading and arithmetic. Later she went on to spend two years as an English teacher in Quito, Ecuador, before returning to her much loved primary school, where she worked from 1979 to 1998.
During those years she experienced a phase which was both exciting and tragic at the same time after she and Christa McAuliffe were selected from thousands of fellow teachers for the “Teacher in Space” project on 19 July 1985. One of them was destined to participate in live educational programmes from space for schoolchildren all over the country as part of a PR campaign under which NASA hoped to infuse primary schoolchildren with enthusiasm for science.
It was soon decided that Christa would be the one who flew and Barbara would “only” be the backup. Despite this, she did not betray her feelings and trained as if for real, using all NASA's PR campaigns to promote the project. The crew with whom she trained was that of the shuttle orbiter Challenger earmarked for mission STS-51L.
When the shuttle exploded in a giant ball of fire shortly after lift-off and all seven astronauts on board died, Barbara Morgan's world collapsed. Her thankless place on the substitutes' bench had saved her life, but how could her disappointment at being forever the backup suddenly be transformed into joy at surviving when Christa, her best friend, had died?
On top of that, her mission objective had not been accomplished and from this she gathered fresh strength, refused to give up and continued to work wholeheartedly with NASA's Education Division alongside her day job. She was determined that Christa should not have died in vain.
Ultimately this ambition led her to be reappointed by NASA in January 1998, but this time not just to be the teacher taken along with the astronauts: she would now be a fully trained mission specialist entitled to call herself Educator Astronaut. She is now able to perform all the tasks onboard a shuttle which her astronaut colleagues also carry out.
In 2002 it seemed that her chance to fly in space had finally come, this time to the International Space Station, from where she would deliver her lessons. The quiet, industrious woman who had completed her training in the four previous years with the same ambition with which she had earlier taught children to read was suddenly propelled back to the centre of media attention. Again she stressed that her primary objective was to fulfil the bequest of Christa McAuliffe – but then Columbia burned up on its way back to Cape Canaveral.
Most other people would have given up at this point if they had not done so already. Not Barbara Morgan. With an unspoken but nevertheless perceptible resolve to “show them”, she threw herself back into her work, put herself through the selection procedure for a new appointment all over again and finally was assigned to the crew of mission STS-118. After 21 years of waiting she finally has her chance to make the “Teacher in Space” project come true and above all she can finally step out of the shadow of her famous dead colleague.
From page 86 of FLUG REVUE 9/2007
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