Educator-Astronaut: Barbara Morgan

Of all the wonders and surprises Barbara Morgan has experienced since reaching orbit 13 days ago, nothing compared to the biggest jolt of all: coming home.

Gravity did not sit pretty on the pale but happy teacher-turned-astronaut, who just a few hours after landing already was laying plans for taking her experiences into the classroom.

First though, there will be a reunion with her family and hopefully a good night’s sleep to shake off the dizziness that often comes to those who breach the bonds of gravity and then re-subject themselves to its unbending force.

The first clue that Barbara was finding Earth harder to adapt to than space came about an hour after Endeavour’s flawless touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida midday Tuesday. Her six crewmates climbed out of the medical van to take a short walk around the shuttle and greet the dozens of NASA officials and friends who had gathered at the runway to welcome them home. Barb stayed beind.

"This was Barbara's first flight. She was feeling just a little bit under the weather,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who was among the officials greeting the crew at the runway, told reporters.”

“She was doing just fine, but she wasn’t able to stand up and walk around out in Florida heat. Having stood up and walked around out there in the Florida heat, I was about ready to join her,” he added.

Four hours later Barbara mustered her resolve, tucked her hair inside a red baseball cap and fixed her head as straight as possible to join her crewmates for a short press conference.

“My first plan is to get rid of the room spinning, and that should happen pretty soon,” Barbara said. " It's actually pretty interesting if you could be in my body.”

Obviously struggling for balance, Barb gutted it through the briefing, closing her eyes periodically and turning her head as little as possible, but clearly still entranced by the experience of being in space.

I asked her if she felt changed in any way. “It’s a great sense of pride to be able to be involved in a human endeavor that takes us all a little bit farther," she said. "When you look down and see our Earth ... and you realize what we are trying to do as a human race, it's pretty profound."

It was a moving experience to stand in the Mission Control room of the Challenger Center at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center and watch the shuttle launch. Not just to see the launch in high-definition, but to be surrounded by a group of very inspired and motivated teachers who had attended the Sally Ride Science STS-118 Educator Institute at the San Diego Air & Space Museum just days before. There were two levels of high emotion - one was the feeling of personal investment from the teachers, who had just learned so much about this important mission, and clapped and cheered at each key moment in the launch. The other was the sense of fulfillment for the Challenger Center, set up to continue the educational mission of STS 51-L. At last, there was a teacher in space, and there was a strong sense that some long-term wishes were finally coming true.

I love how this mission, in partnership with organizations such as Sally Ride Science, has inspired and ignited interest in so many educators around the nation and the world, who feel like they are riding along with the crew, and in turn are motivating the next generation of scientists, engineers and explorers. It's a buzz that will continue long after this mission is over.

I am so excited that my students will participate in the STS-118 Engineering Design Challenge: Lunar Plant Growth Chamber! It is a perfect way for me to implement real world inquiry based science to my junior high students. The students will be engaged in hands-on, minds-on science exploration. We will begin by using the Space Garden to duplicate the projects on the ISS and space shuttle. Then I will challenge students to design, build and evaluate their own chambers. To test, students will build duplicate chambers to compare plants grown from both space-flown and Earth-based control seeds. Students may study seed germination rates, how fast the basil grows compared to Earth basil, and/or sizes and number of leaves. I'm sure these plans will be everchanging, since the students will be doing the questioning and exploring. It will be fun to watch the students meet this challenge!

Julie Miller, Science Teacher
Olathe Kansas

Endeavour mission specialist Barbara Morgan is busy packing up the orbiter in advance of what will be her last educational event of the STS-118 mission -- a space-to-ground activity with students in Canada.

Look for Morgan to join Canadian Space Agency astronaut Dave Williams during a chat with students at Northlands College in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. The event is scheduled to begin at 11:46 a.m. EDT today and you can watch a live webcast in The Flame Trench, which is the space blog of Florida Today newspaper.

The url is http://www.floridatoday.com/floridatoday/blogs/spaceteam/. Once there, simply click the link below the Mission Webcast headline to launch our NASA TV viewer.

Morgan, 55, now is stowing gear on the middeck of Endeavour's crew cabin, and after the educational event, she'll help close out the Spacehab module in the shuttle's cargo bay.

Then, at the tail end of what has been a hectic mission, Morgan will have a few hours of off-duty time -- time she'll most likely use to sear the view out cockpit windows into her memory and savor the feeling of floating in weightlessness.

Endeavour and its crew are scheduled to land at 12:32 p.m. Tuesday here at Kennedy Space Center.

The astronauts on shuttle Endeavour must be feeling a bit cramped today, with seven people floating around the small crew cabin after enjoying nine days aboard the sprawling International Space Station. But you won't hear any complaints. Besides, by now even the first-time fliers, like teacher Barbara Morgan, have long since learned how to make full use of the ceilings and walls.

There's still some packing up to do, but the crew enjoyed a few hours time off for planet-watching and other recreational activities. Soaring 214 miles above the planet, they caught sight of Hurricane Dean, the massive storm that is prompting NASA to end the mission a day early.

Managers are concerned the powerful storm, which is blasting into the Gulf of Mexico with its 145-mph winds, could force an evacuation of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which operates the shuttle during flight.

Weather in Florida is looking good for a change and if conditions hold, Barbara will be testing her land legs for the first time in 13 days on Tuesday. Touchdown is scheduled for about 12:32 p.m. Eastern time.

If storm stays on its present track however and veers south of Texas, NASA could decide to keep the shuttle in orbit for a few extra days if weather or technical issues prevent a Florida touchdown on Tuesday. Landing at the backup site in California adds a few weeks time to prepare the shuttle for a cross-country piggyback ride on top of a specially modified jet aircraft, which NASA would rather not have to do.

Before the astronauts' time-off, they unfolded the shuttle's robot arm, doubled its length with a laser- and camera-tipped extension boom and for a third time since reaching orbit, scanned their ship's heat shield for any damage that could pose a hazard during the superheated descent through the atmosphere. Traveling at 25 times the speed of sound, the shuttle's outer surfaces get as hot as the surface of the sun. The ceramic tiles and carbon wing panels keep the ship's aluminum frame intact during the ride through the atmosphere.

The shuttle is returning with a small divot in two of its belly tiles, but NASA says it is 100 percent sure the damage will not pose a threat to the crew or the shuttle during re-entry.
The crew's last day in space will be spent testing out all the equipment needed for landing and packing away any equipment and items that are still floating around the crew cabin.

Barb will be getting an eyeful on the ride home. She's upgraded her launch seat in the window-less mid-deck for one on the flight deck, which is filled with windows.

 After a tedious six-day review Barbara Morgan and her crewmates aboard shuttle Endeavour learned that the best brains at NASA believe the spaceship is safe to fly through the atmosphere without fixing a tiny but deep cut carved into two heat-resistant tiles on the ship’s belly.

 The tiles protect the ship from the fierce temperatures of atmosphere re-entry when the shuttle leaves orbit and heads back home.

 After all the analysis, computer simulations and laboratory tests, the vote was unanimous that the damage would not comprise the shuttle or crew’s safety. One group of engineers, however, believed NASA should go ahead and have spacewalkers fill the gap with a special putty to add an extra buffer.

 In the end, managers decided the risks of the spacewalk were greater than the risk of additional damage to the shuttle.

 "We have a lot of faith in the program and we'll do what the engineers decide is the best thing for us to do,” Barbara said during an in-flight interview. “We have all confidence we're going to be able to do the right thing."

 Her commander Scott Kelly said, “We agree absolutely 100 percent with the decision to not repair the damage. There was a lot of engineering rigor put into making this decision, it took some time but that was because there was a lot of testing going on … So even though a repair could potentially provide a little bit more margin, there is certainly more risk in doing the repair than we're willing to take. We were certainly concerned that if we did the repair we could potentially cause more damage to the underside of the orbiter.

 Heat shield damage is what triggered the loss of Columbia and its seven-member crew in 2003, so the issue is an emotional one. NASA developed a host of in-flight inspection tools, repair kits and other options to give astronauts more options in case of serious heat shield damage.

 The 3.5-inch long gouge on Endeavour, however, is only expected to raise the temperature of the underlying aluminum skin by 40 degrees Fahrenheit (the normal temperature in that area during re-entry is up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.)

 No sooner did NASA put the heat shield issue to bed, then it was faced with a new threat: Hurricane Dean, a monster storm chugging its way toward the Gulf of Mexico.

 Barbara’s mission may end a day early, as NASA scrambles to batten down the hatches at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which may be forced to evacuate. There’s an emergency mission control center that could be set up for the shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but managers would rather try to get the shuttle home before the storm hits.

 In an interview, Barbara told me that she has been busy documenting and absorbing as much as possible about what’s going on around her aboard the shuttle and the space station so that she can come up with more ideas about how to turn the spaceflight experience into hands-on activities for schoolchildren.

 She certainly will have a lot of adventures to choose from.

It was a moment more than 21 years in the making. School children at an educational center set up by the families of the lost Challenger crew speaking, at long last, to a teacher in orbit.

"Barb, we've been standing by waiting for your signal from space for 21 years," June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger commander Dick Scobee, told shuttle Endeavour astronaut Barbara Morgan.

June heads the Challenger Center for Space Science Education and she spoke to Barbara from the institute’s Alexandria, Va., location. With her were dozens of children who had a long list of questions about life in space for Barbara and her crewmate, Alvin Drew.

Barbara, a teacher who joined the astronaut corps, originally trained as the backup to Dick Scobee’s crewmate, Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher selected by NASA to fly on the shuttle as part of a public outreach program called Teacher-in-Space.

When a launch accident claimed the crew, Barbara agreed to continue with the program in the hopes that one day NASA would again fly a teacher on the shuttle.

"It made me so happy to know the Challenger Center was there, that we had a chance to speak with the kids this morning, that June was there leading the charge as always," Barbara told me in an in-flight interview after the event. "It's in our hearts and it's wonderful."

In spite of the shuttle program’s two fatal accidents, Barbara said she’d still give the program an “A-plus.”

"This work is incredibly challenging,” she said. “Once we don't have the shuttle any more I think it's going to be something that we all look back on with great nostalgia and we're really, really going to miss it.”

The wake-up call this morning may have left Barbara Morgan’s crewmates scratching their heads, but she knew who it was. The astronauts’ eighth day in space began with a tune written and recorded by Morgan’s son Adam.

The proud mom didn’t have much time for beaming. Barbara and the rest of the shuttle Endeavour crew had another spacewalk to get ready for. This time it was the flight engineer, Rick Mastracchio, heading out the station’s airlock for his third spacewalk of the mission, paired with the U.S. space station resident crewmember, Clay Anderson, a lively, loquacious Nebraskan who likes to work the phrase “canned corn” into his banter as much as possible.

Barbara’s job during the planned 6.5-hour outing was to maneuver the shuttle’s robot arm so good TV pictures of the men would be available as much as possible. This is not done for the millions of arm-chair astronauts who enjoy living vicariously. Keeping a watchful eye on the spacewalkers could be a matter of life or death.

Take Wednesday’s spacewalk for example. It started off smoothly, with Rick and Clay floating out the station’s airlock early. They had a few different tasks to get a solar array segment ready for its move in October when the next shuttle arrives with a connecting node for the station’s new laboratories.

They took down part of a communications antenna, then picked up the first of two work carts that needed to be moved to the other side of the station’s rail system. After the second cart was relocated, the astronauts checked their gloves for tears, a routine part of spacewalks since damage was discovered after a spacewalk at the outpost in December.

And then the unexpected news from Rick, reporting a small hole in the outer layer of his left glove.

Following flight rules, he was told to go back to the station’s airlock and hook up his suit to the station’s power, ending his work shift a couple of hours early. To add insult to injury, flight directors needed him to shut the thermal cover on the hatch door to keep the temperature within its proper range, so he couldn't even look out.

He floated alone in the small chamber, waiting for Clay to finish up some work at the top of the station’s outer left truss segment. For added safety, NASA likes to have its spacewalkers work in pairs, so Rick’s glove problem cut short Clay’s outing too.

There was only one job they didn’t get to -- bringing in two experiments -- but the shortened spacewalk was a disappointment nonetheless. The damage to the glove also adds another issue for NASA engineers to resolve. In addition to deciding if the shuttle’s slightly damaged heat shield needs to be repaired in orbit, engineers will be working around the clock to figure out how the glove was torn and if it is safe to continue as planned with the fourth spacewalk of the mission, which has been rescheduled for Saturday.

On a brighter note, Barbara is scheduled for another round of chats with school kids, this time organized by the educational institute established by the widow of the Challenger crew’s cammander. Barbara trained with the Challenger astronauts as the backup to Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe. She stayed with NASA for 21 years to continue Christa’s mission.

A long last, Barbara Morgan got to do something she’s been looking forward to for more than two decades: talk to students from space.

She and three astronauts fielded questions from children gathered at the Discovery Center of Idaho, Barbara’s home state. They kept the kids laughing with orbital demonstrations of drinking in space, chasing a slow-moving baseball and microgravity juggling.

Ever the teacher, Barbara managed to squeeze in a quick science lecture when one student asked her about operating the shuttle’s robot arm.

“A really big challenge is trying to keep yourself steady, because as you probably know from Newton’s law, ‘Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,’ she said, demonstrating how her body floats up when she pivoted a control stick. “You’ve got to learn to really restrain yourself and hold yourself down with foot loops,” Barbara said.

Nine years of training in the astronaut corps couldn’t prepare her for the way she felt in space, especially during the first few days of the mission. “It was pretty much a big surprise for me the very first day when the whole day I felt like I was upside-down. There’s just no preparing for that. It’s just something you experience and enjoy and get used to,” she said.

Even though Barbara had to give up classroom teaching to become an astronaut, she said there really wasn’t much difference between the two jobs. “Astronauts and teachers actually do the same thing,” she said. “We explore, we discover and we share. The great thing about being a teacher is that you get to do that with students. And the great thing about being an astronaut is that you get to do it in space. Those are absolutely wonderful jobs.”

Almost 22 years after the 1986 Challenger accident, Endeavour mission specialist will teach in space today, answering questions posed by students at a science center in the state where she taught for almost a quarter-century.

Look for Morgan, 55, and three fellow astronauts -- Al Drew, Dave Williams and Clay Anderston -- to field queries from students gathered at the Discovery Center of Idaho in Boise starting at 5:09 p.m. EDT today. Teachers across the state nominated the 18 students -- grades four through eight -- who will be taking part in the space-to-ground Q&A session.

You can watch a live webcast of the event in The Flame Trench -- the space blog of Florida Today, the Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper based in the Kennedy Space Center area. Simply follow this link: http://www.floridatoday.com/floridatoday/blogs/spaceteam/.

Enjoy!