Teachers Reveal Inner Selves on Way to Outer Space

--Despite being poked, prodded, analyzed by NASA doctors and forced to sit inside a large, dark “beach ball,” the 10 finalists in the competition to become the first teacher in space said they are being treated like royalty. The six women and four men underwent medical and psychological tests at the Johnson Space Center in Texas prior to a flight Friday aboard a KC-135 airplane that causes brief periods of weightlessness. “They know us inside and out,” second-grade teacher Barbara Morgan, 33, of McCall, Ida., said after the medical tests. “They know the height of my belly button.” One of the tests required the astronaut candidates to spend 10 minutes inside a zippered and inflated “personal rescue sphere” with a diameter of about 39 inches. “It looks like a big beach ball,” said sixth-grade teacher Robert Foerster, 34, of West Lafayette, Ind. The teachers also took a 40-minute written psychological test and were interviewed individually for two hours by a psychiatrist. “They want to make sure you won’t pull a knife on the shuttle commander,” said English teacher Richard Methia, 40, of New Bedford, Mass. The lucky teacher and a backup will be named in mid-July.

--One of the Americans aboard the TWA jetliner hijacked last month quit her job as an interior decorator to do “something that has a little more meaning.” Agnes Leber, of Middletown, R.I., said that she made her decision after reflecting on her ordeal, which ended with her release in Algiers about 12 hours after the jet was hijacked by Arab terrorists on a flight from Athens to Rome on June 14. “I can’t seem to get back into it. It just seems absolutely trivial,” she said. “You’re there, and you might die and you look at your life and ask, ‘Did I live it to the fullest?’ or whatever.” Her career as a decorator has been “extremely successful” but “it just seems totally inane,” she said. “The whole incident has made me stop short and look at my life. There are more important things in life than this nonsense that I’ve been doing.” Leber, 53 and divorced, said she is not sure what she wants to do next. However, “I’d like to do something that has a little more meaning to it than worry about somebody’s draperies.” Leber added that she might want to do something to help “educate the people of this country as to what’s going on over there” in the Middle East. “You realize a lot of people hate the Americans. We don’t even realize it.”