FOR MANY people, there were a few white-knuckle minutes Wednesday evening as the space shuttle Endeavour lifted off on its latest mission. On board was Barbara Morgan, once a schoolteacher and now a full-time astronaut. On her first space mission, Morgan was completing a mission barely begun 21 years ago by another teacher, Christa McAuliffe.
In January 1986, McAuliffe was supposed to be the first “Teacher in Space” as part of a much-touted National Aeronautics and Space Agency program. She never got there. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, a leak of hot gases from one of the booster rockets triggered the disintegration of the boosters and the external fuel tank and sent the space shuttle Challenger on a brief, tumbling arc into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all on board.
Morgan was there that day. She was also part of the Teacher in Space program and was McAuliffe’s backup. If McAuliffe had gotten sick or been injured before the flight, Morgan would have been aboard Challenger that day.
Is it any wonder that Morgan’s first flight, two decades after the Challenger disaster, made people hold their breath? Those who are old enough to remember — including millions who were schoolchildren in 1986 and watched the Challenger launch and explosion from their classrooms — could be excused the feeling that they were about to relive that heartbreaking moment.
Readers of omens and portents pointed out that Endeavour was the shuttle built to replace Challenger and that Morgan would be occupying the same seat — the middle seat on the lower deck — that McAuliffe was assigned to in 1986.
But when the launch came, the fears were proven to be no more than superstition. Endeavour thundered into the sky, passed the 73-second mark without a glitch and continued on to orbit. Today, Morgan and her crewmates, their ship docked at the International Space Station, go about their tasks.
One of those tasks for Morgan is talking to students in their classrooms back on Earth. The Teacher in Space program died shortly after Challenger, but the aspirations of some teachers to teach from space never died.
Last week’s fears proved groundless, rooted in a traumatic event 21 years ago. But the risks that astronauts do face are real — as real today as they were the day that Challenger went down or the day in 2003 when Columbia came apart in the sky over Texas.
It says something about her quality as both an astronaut and a teacher that Morgan, who knows the risks as well as any person alive, has spent the past 21 years preparing to follow Christa McAuliffe and complete her mission.