After 15 years, Christa McAuliffe's backup finally may go into space. But when Barbara Morgan boards the shuttle, she says, she will be just one of many people carrying on McAuliffe's work.
Morgan, a resident of McCall, Idaho, was the third-grade teacher chosen as backup to McAuliffe, a social-studies teacher from New England who was to be the first "teacher in space." The two trained together for four months and shared the dream of helping students learn about space science.
But when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, killing McAuliffe and the six other crew members, NASA backed off. Putting a teacher in orbit had turned out to be a high-profile gamble with terrible consequences, especially for the many thousands of students who watched the launch on live TV.
The program was cancelled.
"Right now we do not have any plans to establish any sort of civilian-in-space program," Kirsten W. Larson, spokeswoman for NASA at the space agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., said last week.
Deprived of that route, Morgan held onto her dream of space flight. At last, in January 1998, she was selected as a member of the astronaut candidate class of 1998—not as a teacher in space, but as a regular astronaut.
She and her husband, the writer Clay Morgan, moved to Houston, where she has been undergoing rigorous astronaut training. She will become a mission specialist, she said, "but my number-one thing I hope to do most is education."
She is learning to cover a variety of NASA jobs, from flight engineer to science experiments to helping build the new International Space Station through robotics and spacewalks. "There's never an end to training," she said.
Learning about assembling the space station could be important to her future space missions, as she hopes eventually to have a shuttle flight assignment. "Most of our flights are going there now for assembly operations," she said.
Meanwhile, she is learning to be capsule communicator for the International Space Station, an official who will speak to astronauts from the command center on Earth.
Eventually, she hopes to return to Idaho.
"I see myself as a teacher, so I'm really enjoying this from a learning standpoint," she said. "It's fun to be able to contribute . . . but it's also an incredible learning experience that I hope to be able to share with other teachers and students."
She is learning these highly technical jobs from an unusual perspective, she added: "I think I'm doing it with teacher's eyes and ears."
Asked if she feels as if she is carrying on McAuliffe's work, she said, "I could never, ever, replace Christa. She is, was and will always be, our teacher in space. She was absolutely tremendous.
"I feel very lucky and honored to be participating, just as I did back then. What Christa was trying to do was very, very important and very, very right."
It would be a mistake to think just one person could carry on McAuliffe's work, she thinks. "There are so many people in this country that are carrying on what Christa started. I am just one of those people."
Another of those continuing McAuliffe's work is the late teacher's mother, Grace Corrigan, a resident of Framingham, Mass.
Corrigan often speaks to student groups about her daughter and space science.
"It's been absolutely excellent. I have never had a bad audience," she said.
Learning about McAuliffe makes students feel good about themselves. "To hear that she was an ordinary person and she had this opportunity" helps the students realize that they can achieve great things themselves, "if you just try hard and want it and work."
Corrigan's assistant—Andrea Hamel, also from Framingham—said the first "teacher in space" struck a chord with the public.
"From the beginning, there's been a huge outpouring from people all over the place, and to this day the mail still continues," she said.
National Christa McAuliffe fellowships are offered to teachers through the Council of Chief School Officers, she noted. A planetarium in Concord, N.H., where McAuliffe lived with her husband and children, has been named the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium.
Seven scholarships are awarded each year in McAuliffe's honor at Framingham State College, her alma mater. The Christa McAuliffe Archives were recently established at the same college.
The archives includes letters, tributes and memorials that were sent to the family, "especially from the time of the explosion," Hamel said. "The family saved all the mail that has come in."
Asked how the family is coping, she said, "I would imagine it always will be a terrible, terrible shock," but Corrigan is carrying her daughter's message.
"The dream has not died at all," she said. It is visible in the eyes of children who were not even born when Challenger exploded, she said.
Corrigan said the family is compiling a list of schools around the country that are named after her daughter. She thinks the total is 35 or 36, plus four outside the United States.
Hamel noted that one learning center named after McAuliffe is in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
That is the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center at Central Elementary School. "The center just celebrated its 10th anniversary," said Central's principal, Daniel K. Adams.
"We have five simulators that they take students into for two-hour missions," Adams said. Field trips with students from other schools are daily events.
In the simulators, which have a slightly science-fiction quality, students take different "space jobs" during a simulated journey.
In addition, the center runs a space camp every summer. "So far, in the 10 years we've averaged about 10,000 students a year, so we're up over 120,000 now."
Besides teaching facts about space, the center remembers McAuliffe, Adams said. Instructors discuss her "contributions to space education and, of course, the tragic accident that took place."
E-MAIL: bau@desnews.com