Two Voices, One Mind

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.”