NASA set to fly teacher, 21 years after Challenger

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug 5 (Reuters) A teacher who walked out of the classroom she loved a decade ago to join the U.S. astronaut corps is scheduled to fly aboard the space shuttle Endeavour this week on a mission to the International Space Station.

NASA plans to launch Endeavour today on a construction and resupply mission to the orbiting outpost.

The ship's cargo bay holds a short piece of the station's structural beam, a replacement gyroscope needed to keep the growing complex properly positioned in orbit, an outdoor equipment storage platform and a cargo container filled with gear for the resident crew.

But the focus of the flight, which will be the 119th for the shuttle program, falls on a petite 55-year-old crew member named Barbara Morgan, a teacher who taught school in McCall, Idaho, until joining the astronaut corps 10 years ago.

Morgan wasn't a newcomer to NASA, having trained in 1985 alongside ''Teacher in Space'' Christa McAuliffe, who flew with the Challenger crew in January 1986.

McAuliffe's mission ended in tragedy 73 seconds after liftoff when one of the shuttle's booster rockets failed, triggering an explosion that killed the New Hampshire high school teacher and six astronauts.

After the accident, NASA asked Morgan to serve as its Teacher in Space designee but failed to make good on its offer because a policy change imposed after the Challenger accident banned civilians from flying on the shuttle.

A decade ago, Morgan's backers worked out a deal. She would join the astronaut corps and become a fully trained member of the crew, the first of a new category of astronauts called education-mission specialists. Three more teachers are now astronauts.

It was not the job of her dreams but Morgan accepted nonetheless, fulfilling a commitment she made after the Challenger disaster and reaffirmed after Columbia's demise in 2003.

'DO THE RIGHT THING' ''After the Challenger accident, we had school kids all over the world looking at adults and watching what adults do in a bad situation and I felt it was really important to show them that adults do the right thing,'' Morgan said in an interview.

''I'm personally very excited about going into space, but that's not my motivation. I'm here because of that and because I'm a schoolteacher,'' she said.

Morgan, who is married to novelist Clay Morgan and mother to two grown sons, will have only about six hours during the 11- to 14-day flight for educational events, but she plans to help develop classroom curriculum from her experiences after her return.

Most of her time in space will be spent operating the shuttle's robot arm and shuffling cargo to and from the station.

The outpost today received another 5,000 pounds (2,250 kg) of cargo aboard an unmanned Russian Progress spacecraft. In addition to fuel, water and food, the capsule delivered a new computer and cables to fix problems that cropped up during NASA's last shuttle mission to the station in June.

NASA plans just 11 more construction missions to the 100 billion dollars station, which is a little more than half-finished.

The agency also would like to fly two resupply missions and a final servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope before the shuttle fleet is retired in three years.

Though Morgan's mission has been 21 years in the making, her flight couldn't be more perfectly timed. NASA's image has been badly battered by accusations of inebriated astronauts aboard spaceships, the sabotage of a space station computer and the continuing fallout from the romantic triangle that forced Lisa Nowak and Bill Oefelein out of the astronaut corps and may put Nowak in jail.

A lesson from a school teacher may be just what the agency needs to get itself back on track. Endeavour's liftoff is scheduled for 6:36 p.m. EDT (0406 IST) on thursday.

The countdown was set to start today at 8 p.m. EDT (0530 IST).

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