Mission Accomplished

New challenges await teacher–astronaut Barbara R. Morgan, who is on “one grand, lifelong learning adventure”

Mission STS-118 aboard the space shuttle Endeavour was everything teacher Barbara R. Morgan had trained and prepared for, and yet from space, “the Earth was even more beautiful than I expected,” she said. And the sky itself was beautiful: “It was black, a black you have never seen before, like black obsidian—but it was creamy, not in color but more in texture.”

Morgan, a mission specialist, said she spent every minute she wasn’t working looking out the window, looking at what she could never see from the surface of the planet. She and six crew members traveled 5.3 million miles above and around Earth, completing their mission that began August 8, 2007, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and ended August 21 with a picture-perfect landing.

The 22nd shuttle flight to the International Space Station was an unqualified success. During the mission, Endeavour’s crew added another truss segment, a new gyroscope, and external spare parts platform to the orbiting space station. A new system that enables docked shuttles to draw electrical power from the station to extend visits to the outpost also was activated successfully, allowing them to stay a couple of days longer.

Morgan, 55, was Christa McAuliffe’s backup for the Challenger flight that exploded in the sky soon after takeoff in 1986. Morgan waited nearly 22 years for the chance to soar in space, and now she wants students to realize that “any one of them could do this.” As she went from liftoff to orbit to docking with the station, she thought of the teachers below—and for them she had a special message: “Every teacher is by my side.”

Morgan’s chief responsibility on the mission was to operate the robotic arm involved in assembling pieces of equipment. Endeavour carried about 5,000 pounds of equipment and supplies to the station and returned to Earth with some 4,000 pounds of hardware and no longer needed equipment. During the mission, three crew members performed four spacewalks.

Though she expected the flight to be wonderful, it took a little bit of time to adjust to weightlessness, she said. All the fluid in the body moves to the upper portion and your inner ear and eyes don’t agree about what’s going on. Astronauts learn that during the first couple of days in microgravity they should orient themselves so the ceiling is above and the floor at their feet, but even so, some people feel like they’re being pitched forward. She said she felt like her body was upside down the whole first day. But “It’s really, really neat,” she said, “and by the third day it was very natural.” She said it was “like flying in your dreams.”

As the shuttle circled the planet every 90 minutes at 25 times the speed of sound, Morgan and three of her crewmates were asked by students at the Discovery Center of Boise, Idaho, in one of two “classroom in space” sessions, “How does being a teacher relate to being an astronaut?”

Her answer no doubt endeared her to many an educator.

“Astronauts and teachers actually do the same thing,” she said, her thick dark brown hair floating above and around her head because of the microgravity environment. “We explore, we discover and we share—and the great thing about being a teacher is we get to do that with students and the great thing about being an astronaut is that you get to do it in space—and both are absolutely wonderful jobs.”

In the video of four astronauts during the teaching session from the space station, Morgan and her co-workers Alvin Drew and Dave Williams, also mission specialists, and Clayton C. Anderson, flight engineer, laughed and joked, threw a baseball, tried to juggle ping pong balls, and caught globs of floating juice. They appeared to be having a lot of fun and Morgan confirmed that. She said it was hard work, but fun—the same as teaching. On the ninth day of the mission, Morgan and Drew also spoke with students at the Challenger Center in Alexandria, Virginia.

Morgan began her teaching career in 1974 on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Arlee, Montana. A longtime member of the International Reading Association, she also taught remedial reading/math and second grade in McCall, Idaho, and English and science to third graders in Ecuador.

From September 1985 to January 1986, she trained with Christa McAuliffe for the NASA Teacher in Space Program with the Challenger crew at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and witnessed the fatal accident in which seven crew members died.

After the Challenger accident, Morgan assumed the duties of Teacher in Space Designee. She worked with NASA, speaking to children and teachers all across the country. In fall 1986, Morgan returned to Idaho to resume teaching while continuing her work with NASA, speaking, consulting, and helping design curricula. She also has been a featured speaker at the IRA Annual Convention.

Selected by NASA as a mission specialist in January 1998, Morgan completed two years of training and evaluation, and was assigned to the Astronaut Office Space Station Operations Branch. She then worked in Mission Control as prime communicator with on-orbit crews and also served in the Robotics Branch.

When asked what message her participation in STS-118 conveyed to teachers and students around the world, she said “Speaking from a literature perspective, I would want them to see it as ‘a good story.’ It’s a story about challenges, disappointments, rewards, good things, and bad things.”

And she wants them to know how important reading was to developing her interests in education and space, and also how important reading is to the everyday work of an astronaut.

She remembers reading My Weekly Reader when she was in second grade and there were stories about space exploration and specifically about chimpanzees being sent into space. “That really captured my attention,” she said. She also was fascinated by looking up at the stars and remembered the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. “It was very interesting to me,” she said, “but it never occurred to me about actually going into space.”

Her love of learning and reading also drew her to her chosen profession. She was studying biology and loved to read about the structure and function of the brain. She also liked anthropology and psychology courses. In one of them, they studied learning theory and how short- and long-term memory operate. While in the college bookstore, she was drawn to the education section because she saw books about learning theory. There she saw a book by Maria Montessori, the founder of the Montessori Method of education. Morgan said she always knew she wanted to do service and “It all fell together. What better place to be than in a classroom?”

For astronauts, reading is a critical part of their work, she said. “We read lots of technical stuff—workbooks, manuals, briefings. For every International Space Station system and for the shuttle, there are data files and checklists.” She said the checklists are somewhat cryptic, in a shorthand code, but there are checklists for the shuttle’s launch, its ascent, for orbiting, robotics, spacewalks, transferring equipment—in short, everything. Astronauts also have to follow written timelines. They can even carry their own “crew notebooks” with personal notes on how to perform certain tasks, etc.

Even spacewalkers have checklists on their shoulders, she said. Written on special material that can withstand the vacuum of space, the astronauts who venture out of the shuttle or station have checklists and emergency procedures written where they can be easily seen.

And just in case you wondered, there is a library—albeit a small one—on the space station. It’s in a bag about as big as a backpack, she said, with books in Russian and English. Morgan said Goethe’s Faust is in there, as is 2001, A Space Odyssey, some Tom Clancy, crossword puzzles, and other works. Morgan said the collection rotates as astronauts bring some new books and return others.

As a teacher, Morgan wants students to think about the future of space travel and how they might play a role. About 10 million basil seeds were taken on the flight; some have actually been suspended outside the space station, where they were exposed to harsh radiation and the vacuum of space. They are being made available to teachers around the United States so their students can help NASA figure out how seeds might be grown successfully in space. It’s an example of what the Teacher in Space program can do—excite students with the real-world application of the science they study and “knock down the four walls of the classroom,” she said. “It’s an exciting opportunity.”

Besides the surprising beauty of the Earth and sky, Morgan also said seeing the space station in orbit with all its equipment and the lights—“as a working space vehicle”—was very exciting. An unwelcome surprise was the challenge posed by the tile damaged on takeoff. Morgan said she was never worried about it—that the situation was always well in hand. Another surprise they didn’t count on was Hurricane Dean, a powerful storm that swept through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Morgan said they flew right above the eye of the storm. Because it could possibly affect landing safety, STS-118 undocked from the space station a day earlier than it could have and touched down August 21.

Since touchdown, Morgan and the other astronauts have been busy debriefing and resting from their space journey. They took time out to visit Disney World in Orlando, Florida, September 10, on “NASA Space Day.” At the celebration a glass plaque was unveiled, inscribed with her personal motto: “Reach for your dreams...the sky is no limit.”

With her grand space adventure over, Morgan quite naturally will look for another. For now, she and the crew are hard at work learning from this mission. She wants to return to the classroom eventually, but is so busy now, she said, she can’t even see what the next two or three years will bring. But the “good story” that Morgan hopes students and teachers see in her accomplishment no doubt has many chapters left to unfold.

Mission accomplished. (October 2007). Reading Today, 25(2), 1,12.