Barbara Morgan Finally Takes Off
Barbara Morgan has such an incredible personal story that it tends to overshadow the teaching mission she's about to undertake. She'd probably be the last person to admit that. The grade school teacher from Idaho is nothing if not humble. And it's not as if her entire purpose in space is solely to teach. She only gets about six hours for that. The rest of the time, she'll be doing the work of an astronaut.
Fitting, considering Morgan hasn't been a full-time teacher in nearly ten years. Technically, she's the first in a new class of NASA Educator-Astronauts. As such, she'll be taking 10 million basil seeds into space with her, and a six-hour lesson plan she'll share via satellite with students on earth. The seeds will be exposed to microgravity. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. Science wasn't my strongest subject. I do know that the seeds will be brought back to earth and sent to classrooms around the country. It may not sound like much of an experiment, but just think about how cool it must be for a student in science class to say his seedling has been to space and back.
Admittedly, it's been a few decades since I was in school, but I still remember the excitement of the Challenger mission. I don't remember if Christa McAuliffe was meant to bring something back from her mission, aside from stories of what it was like, way out there, for a real person instead of a super-human astronaut. For me, that was enough. And I'm not sure if students today are as tuned into Barbara Morgan as the nation was the Christa McAuliffe. Maybe space travel is old hat by now.
Barbara Morgan says she's going up in space with a teacher's "eyes, ears, heart and mind." I'll happily leave the extra-terrestrial herbs to the kids. The teenager in me who never got to hear from the first teacher in space just wants the stories.