Lessons from Nasa's star pupil

Barbara Morgan, an Idaho teacher, was watching from the roof of a concrete building when the pillar of smoke that marked the Challenger space shuttle blossomed into a fireball. As the gyrating booster rockets zigzagged crazily away from the explosion, Morgan was among the first to react. Scrambling down, she raced towards Nasa's giant countdown clock to console the relatives of the crew. The seven dead were her friends and colleagues, among them Christa McAuliffe, America's first, and only, teacher in space.

It could easily have been Morgan strapped into the middle seat, lower deck, of Challenger that frosty January morning in 1986. If McAuliffe had been sick, her understudy would have flown - for all of 76 seconds. After so close an escape, you could understand if Morgan had wanted out. She didn't. In the months and years that followed, she toured America delivering inspirational speeches in support of the battered space administration. Never for a moment, she said, had she entertained second thoughts about going into space.

Seventeen years later, Morgan was flying over the Florida touchdown site in the shuttle training craft, listening to the chatter between mission control and the Columbia flight deck, knowing that the next time that shuttle flew, she was to be aboard. At first, when the radio link lapsed, she didn't worry; blackouts are common during re-entry. But by the time her plane landed at the Kennedy Space Center, there was no doubt. As 40 tons of shuttle wreckage rained on Texas, she found herself again running to console the spouses and children of another group of close friends.

Months later, you could hear the strain in her voice: "I don't have a whole lot to say about it, except it was horrible. More than anything, it's really, really sad."

On another occasion she said: "It's just like after Challenger. People kept asking, 'Gee, aren't you glad it wasn't you?' And I can tell you, none of those thoughts went through my mind at all. All you're doing is thinking about the people and the families and what we can do to make things better." Later still, she explained that her decision to carry on was partly aimed at showing children what adults do when something terrible happens.

Weather permitting and barring any further glitches, let alone catastrophes, Barbara Morgan, now 55, will rocket towards orbit and the International Space Station (ISS) later this week. She'll be flying in Endeavour, America's fifth and last shuttle, built to replace Challenger and named after Captain James Cook's bark (hence its British spelling). Twenty-two years after she watched president Ronald Reagan announce the Teachers in Space programme, this slightly built, softly spoken and incredibly dogged woman will at last get to live her dream.

And the point, in case you missed it, is that Barbara Radding Morgan's dream could have been anyone's. Born in 1951 in Fresno, California, to a doctor and his wife, Morgan was the all-American girl next door. She studied biology at Stanford but was drawn to teaching by the works of Maria Montessori. Her career began on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana and she later taught at an American college in Ecuador. She and her husband, Cliff, a writer, settled in McCall, Idaho, and had two sons. The boys, though, have been kept well away from the limelight; the McAuliffe family found it painful to see clips of Christa playing with her children before her death.

On the surface, Morgan's mission is quite different from McAuliffe's. Two decades ago, the plan was for civilians with a few months' basic safety training to go up as passengers. McAuliffe's main job was to tape lessons that could be distributed to America's schools, helping to impress the importance of space exploration on a generation of future voters. But since Challenger, Nasa hasn't dared risk another civilian's life. Instead, in 1998, it scrapped Teachers in Space, replacing it with a mission specialist category called "educator astronaut". The candidates, led by Morgan, receive full astronaut training, and are expected to do the same jobs as the scientists, engineers and test pilots. In the years since she graduated, Morgan has worked in mission control and Nasa's robotics branch.

During the Endeavour mission, she will help to operate the robot arm as it transfers a strut and a storage platform to the space station and will co-ordinate the unloading of 5,000lb of cargo. She'll also be on the flight deck to assist with reentry. On the scientific side, she's responsible for 10 million basil seeds, some of which will be left on the station in growth chambers, while the rest are returned to schools on Earth for hands-on experimentation. She will, however, hold at least one teleconference with pupils in America, more if attempts to power the shuttle from the ISS's solar cells work and the mission is lengthened by three days. Morgan hasn't lost her enthusiasm for the classroom: "I'm doing the job of an astronaut with the eyes, ears, heart and mind of a teacher," she said.