Space Teacher

Barbara Morgan is a 55-year-old Boomer. That means she was an impressionable girl during the early years of space flight and might have been as fascinated with astronauts and launches as I was. Maybe she watched Walter Cronkite narrate the TV coverage of Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin and the other early space pioneers and thought that she’d like to follow in their footsteps one day.

For Barbara Morgan, that day is here; she is the Space Teacher on the current Shuttle Mission STS-118.

Ms. Morgan was an elementary school teacher in Idaho when she first joined the Shuttle program in 1986. She was Christa McAuliffe’s backup and we can only imagine how she felt as she watched Challenger explode, carrying McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, and six others to their deaths just seconds after the launch.

And we can only imagine now the thrill she must feel finally making it into space.

In addition to being a role model for students and teachers, she also provides an example of creative aging, showing fifty-somethings and all others that age does not have to be a limiting factor in achieving our dreams.

In a short video piece on Space.com, Barbara Morgan humbly states that, “I am just the next teacher of many to come,” but I think she will be remembered as the teacher who carried out the legacy and dreams teachers and the rest of us shared twenty-one years ago when we watched Christa McAuliffe first walk down the hall toward Challenger.