Teacher-in-Space : McAuliffe’s Backup Now NASA Envoy

It was a relationship that easily might have bred jealousy, even hostility.

Everywhere they went, Christa McAuliffe was mobbed, while her backup, Barbara Morgan, stood off to the side.

In Houston, where they were training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, a press photographer asked Morgan to stand in a swimming pool and hoist McAuliffe onto her shoulders. The pose would have magnified their different roles. Morgan refused.

Two Small-Town Teachers

Despite such pressures, the two small-town schoolteachers--one from a New Hampshire high school, the other from an elementary school in the mountains of Idaho--became good friends.

Often, after a full day of training, Morgan and McAuliffe, who had neighboring apartments in Houston, would go out together for dinner or drinks and talk about the day. In simulated weightlessness, they played leapfrog and learned to eat and drink in preparation for space travel. They did barrel rolls in supersonic jets and flew in formation together.

When the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff nearly three months ago, Morgan was watching from a special viewing area near the stands at Cape Canaveral. Her husband, Clay, rushed to her side. But Morgan quickly set aside her own shock and grief, and reached out to comfort those around her, including McAuliffe’s parents. Later, she telephoned the survivors of the other Challenger astronauts.

That Jan. 28 tragedy now has thrust Morgan into the limelight.

About two weeks after the explosion, Morgan was on her way home to McCall, Ida., after attending memorial services for the Challenger crew when National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials announced that the agency’s teacher-in-space program would continue.

Morgan, a Fresno native and Stanford graduate, readily accepted NASA’s offer to take McAuliffe’s place and become America’s designated first private citizen in space.

‘Space Ambassador’

And in the past month, Morgan, 34, has crisscrossed the country as a “space ambassador,” professing an unshaken confidence in NASA and telling large gatherings of teachers that space exploration must continue despite the risks, and that education must forge a strong partnership in the effort.

Morgan maintains that she is “a teacher on the road for education,” not for NASA.

Her tour, originally planned for McAuliffe after her return from the Challenger mission, will take her to San Francisco on Monday for an Associated Press panel discussion and to Fresno later this week for appearances before community and school groups.

Morgan’s indomitable optimism and genuine faith in the space program have made her NASA’s brightest media star.

Before the accident, in a series of articles for her hometown newspaper about her NASA training, Morgan had written: “I learned to trust the equipment. I knew I could trust the instructors. There is no way that NASA would put 10 innocent teachers in danger.”

And today Morgan continues to profess the same faith, despite NASA’s flawed decision-making process exposed by the presidential commission investigating the explosion.

‘Not A Quitter’

“Barb’s not a quitter,” said Morgan’s boss, elementary school principal John Wall. “She just won’t quit if she’s in the middle of something interesting.” This is perhaps one of the traits that also makes her an “excellent” teacher, he said.

“I firmly believe that our future is out in space and that ordinary people are going to be out there,” said Morgan, who wears her shoulder-length, straight hair fastened on one side with a clip, and favors outfits with Peter Pan collars and puffed sleeves. Her little-girl looks and disarming smile are part of a warm but assertive style.

“When we settled the West, we didn’t send out a few explorers and that was it. You had all your ordinary citizens. . . . And I’m sure that’s the way it’s going to happen in the space program.”

NASA’s promotion of Morgan has struck some people as premature. And, in Morgan’s hometown of McCall, some of her friends privately worry that the pressures of presenting a strong public image on NASA’s behalf might take a toll on Morgan, especially in light of her personal loss.

But as she hopscotches across the country, Morgan seems to be enjoying the adulation from fellow teachers at national conventions as “the person who’s taking up the challenge.” They laud her courage and conviction with standing ovations and crowd around her for autographs and to thank her for elevating the status of their profession.

Morgan, an outdoors woman whose idea of a good time is getting together to “jam” with musician friends on a Saturday night, seems at ease sharing the dais with Nobel laureates, even if her hands still shake after each speech. She sometimes tugs nervously on a tiny gold space shuttle--a gift from her brother--that she wears on a chain around her neck.

Even as a child growing up in the 1950s, Morgan had complained jealously to her parents that NASA should have sent her, instead of a monkey, into space.

Morgan also announced, early on, that she wanted to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “She probably didn’t know she was a girl for a few years,” recalled her father, Jerome Radding, a Fresno physician. The Raddings have four other children--all boys.

The Radding brood left a lasting impression on former teachers at Hoover High School, where Morgan was a popular student and a cheerleader. They recalled the Radding children as remarkably well-rounded students who were outstanding scholastically as well as in athletics, student government and music.

Although the family lived in Fresno’s most exclusive part of town, the Raddings sent their children to a high school outside the neighborhood so they could mix with a broader cross-section of students, according to Morgan’s former high school counselor.

Three of Morgan’s brothers have remained in California. The youngest is completing postgraduate work at the USC school of dentistry. Two others, a lawyer and a building contractor, live in San Luis Obispo County. The fourth is an accountant in Eugene, Ore.

‘Wasn’t an Angel’

Although exceptional in many ways, “Barbara wasn’t an angel,” said her former swimming coach, Susan E. Harden, now a high school principal in Fresno. She recalled the many times her house was decorated with toilet paper by her students, “with Barbara right in the middle.”

Harden also pinpointed the one shortcoming in Morgan’s character that friends and acquaintances volunteered after seemingly racking their brains: She’s always late.

In high school it almost cost her swim team a meet. And, in McCall, it still annoys friends who are frequently kept waiting. “We tease her that she’ll be late for the shuttle,” one said.

Wall, the principal where McCall teaches, recalled the time that Morgan “got carried away” with the day’s lesson and continued teaching right through the bell. The children missed their bus and 25 parents had to be called to pick up their children.

“When she’s doing something, she does it all the way,” he said. “She tries to make learning interesting and exciting.”

Morgan often was the last teacher out of the school parking lot, and at home she usually stayed up past midnight correcting papers and preparing special class projects. Clay Morgan says he saw more of his wife during her NASA training in Houston than he did when they were home in McCall.

Hands-On Approach

According to her colleagues, Morgan’s hands-on approach to education may involve arranging to bring students to school at night to teach an astronomy lesson, or dressing them in traditional Japanese garb, having them eat seaweed and write a type of poem called haiku when teaching them about Japan.

This philosophy was one of many things Morgan and McAuliffe had in common.

Like McAuliffe, Morgan was picked by a state panel of educators as one of Idaho’s top two candidates for NASA’s teacher-in-space program. More than 11,000 teachers applied, from which about 114 semifinalists were selected.

“I can understand why Barbara and Christa seemed to get along so well,” said a member of the Idaho screening panel. “They’re the same type of people.”

The moment Barbara Morgan walked into the Idaho Office of Education screening committee room, some of the judges recall being immediately impressed by her animated manner and ability to make them feel comfortable. Some also were enchanted by Morgan’s characteristic wide-eyed enthusiasm, which some compare to a curious child’s charming intensity.

She Was Game

“You could tell from the minute you met her that she was game for whatever life had to offer,” said Judith Gillespie, a former teacher who sat on the selection panel.

Her eagerness to learn about other cultures led Morgan in 1974 to the Flathead Indian Reservation in Arlee, Mont., where she spent her first year of teaching. Some people there still remember the reserved but dedicated young teacher who never took a lunch break and developed a remarkable rapport with her students. Morgan also taught for a year in Ecuador and was considering a teaching stint in Japan before she was picked by NASA.

Her husband, a writer who published his first novel in 1983, shares her sense of adventure. Gentle and soft-spoken, with blond hair and boyish good looks, Clay Morgan, 35, spends his summers jumping out of airplanes to fight forest fires. While his wife was training in Houston last fall, he spent several weeks in the Amazon jungle doing research for his second novel.

Clay and Barbara Morgan are known among friends in McCall as a “fun couple to be around.” They met at Stanford University and married in 1978. Because of Clay’s family roots in the area, they settled in McCall, a town of about 2,500 just north of Boise.

Clay Morgan has remained by his wife’s side through most of her work for NASA, first in Houston and now in Washington. He also shares her confidence in the space agency.

Johnson Space Center

“The people at the Johnson Space Center are the greatest group of people I ever met,” he said recently, recalling the night that the families of the Challenger crew were flown back to Houston after the explosion.

When they landed at the air base near the Johnson Space Center, at about 2 a.m., “there were hundreds of NASA people waiting for us, standing there out on the Tarmac,” he said.

After the Morgans returned home to McCall in February, they spent a lot of time at their lake-shore cabin where the phone had been disconnected for the winter and snow still blocked the driveway.

One of the first things Barbara Morgan did was visit her students at the McCall-Donnelly Elementary School. She and her husband also arranged get-togethers with groups of friends at local restaurants.

She seemed tired, but still in good spirits, and she regaled them with funny stories about her adventures with McAuliffe and the Challenger crew, friends recalled.

‘Good Friends and Co-Workers’

She told her hometown paper, the Central Idaho Star-News, that she and McAuliffe were “real good friends and co-workers, and I loved her very much.” But Morgan said she hadn’t thought about the tragedy in “personal terms at all. . . . I’ve thought mainly about the (space) program continuing.”

Often, at public appearances, Morgan narrates--without any display of emotion--a video of the training sessions she participated in with the Challenger crew.

“Here’s a real nice shot of the crew . . .” she said, as the images of McAuliffe and the other smiling astronauts flashed on a screen in a New Orleans hall packed with several hundred science teachers. “It tells a real good story: We were doing exactly what we wanted to be doing and working hard, but having fun at it as well.”

Later, however, Morgan declined to talk about her more personal memories of McAuliffe. “I just can’t share those,” she told a reporter apologetically. “I still have some trouble with those questions.”

At first glance, the rugged Alpine beauty of Barbara Morgan’s Idaho hometown--with its Old West architecture and wood-burning stoves--seems a world apart from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The former logging town on the shore of Lake Payette, which is emerging as a winter and summer resort for the Boise Valley, is the kind of place where singles look forward to the tourist season and the chance to see new faces at the local dancing spot. It’s also a town where the locals get together to form their own entertainment. Besides skiing, hiking and sailing outings, Barbara Morgan, who is also a fine flutist, organizes classical and folk music concerts for her neighbors and friends.

But, amid the trappings of a bygone era, residents of McCall remain uncommonly enthusiastic supporters of the space age.

No one was surprised when Morgan accepted NASA’s offer to ride the next available shuttle.

“Everybody in town expected her to say that she’d go,” said postmaster Al Apodaca, who together with some friends had built a replica of the space shuttle in Morgan’s honor for this year’s Winter Festival, which is renowned in the region for its elaborate ice sculptures. After the Challenger disaster, the ice shuttle was turned into a memorial.

Guts and Sensitivity

“She’s a rare person,” said Apodaca, who described Morgan as a combination of guts and sensitivity. “Out of the clear blue she’ll do nice things,” he said, showing a visitor a copy of the official NASA photograph of Morgan in her spacesuit that is seen on office walls and school blackboards all over town. This one was signed: “To my friends at the McCall post office, with love.”

At McCall-Donnelly Elementary School, the children, including Morgan’s former second-graders, had spent months preparing for the Challenger space launch and had come to know the crew by their first names.

Like McAuliffe’s high school in New Hampshire, the children in McCall were to have been hooked up by communication satellite to participate in McAuliffe’s lessons from space, which Morgan was to have hosted from Earth.

Instead, Morgan returned to McCall with a different lesson: how to overcome failure.

“It’s up to her to show them or tell them or hope to teach them to pull it together and go on,” her husband said.

It is also a lesson that Barbara Morgan has taken on the road.

‘NASA Will Fix It’

“I am confident that the (presidential) commission will find out what’s wrong and that NASA will fix it,” she said.

And, she added, “as soon as NASA determines they are ready to send a teacher, I will be there.”

But until the causes of the Jan. 28 disaster are determined and corrected, it is impossible to say just when the shuttle program might resume--much less when a private citizen might be taken along for the ride.

NASA has indicated that there will not be a civilian on the next manned space shuttle and that the earliest that Morgan might fly is in two years, she said. In February, NASA also resumed considering applications for the journalist-in-space program, and 100 semifinalists were announced on Wednesday.

On the road, Morgan is invariably asked whether the shuttle explosion has diminished her confidence in NASA. And Morgan invariably answers that it hasn’t.

‘Can-Do Attitudes’

She says she believes in NASA because “they have all the attitudes we work with our kids on, all the can-do attitudes, and you don’t give up when the going gets rough.”

Morgan said that she and McAuliffe were well aware of the risks involved in the shuttle flight.

For one thing, Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, the Challenger commander, “told us over and over again that this was very risky business . . . and that one of these years there was going to be a bad accident,” she said.

Although she and McAuliffe had talked about the danger involved, “we didn’t dwell on it,” Morgan said. “Christa was ready to go on the shuttle. She couldn’t wait.”

Morgan admitted that she is “probably a little more scared than before” to go into space, but “I’m certainly still willing to do it. . . .”

Morgan, who said her busy speaking schedule has barely left her enough time to do laundry or her income taxes, had granted few interviews until last week when she began making the rounds on morning network television.

Other Teacher Finalists

The other top eight teacher-in-space finalists, like Morgan, are under contract with NASA and are highly sought after for speaking engagements. And the entire “space ambassador” corps--as the 112 semifinalists are called by NASA--are also available, as volunteers, to speak about the space program to educational and community groups across the country.

Morgan said that, much as she is enjoying her whirlwind tour, she is looking forward to returning to her students and friends in the fall and staying put in McCall--until the call from NASA comes.

Her friends in McCall are extremely loyal to Morgan and supportive of her public stance, but some nevertheless admit being disappointed and angry at NASA, as details have emerged of what went wrong within the agency before the launch. And a few can’t help but wonder whether Morgan has had to suppress similar feelings.

“I’ve felt a real disappointment with NASA,” said Char Roth, another teacher at the McCall school, who joined a group of fellow-teachers for a drink at a popular local restaurant one recent afternoon. The last time Morgan was in town, they had crowded around the same table, which overlooks snow-covered Payette Lake, to celebrate her homecoming.

“We thought safety was always first with NASA, but we’ve seen that a lot of things came into play that showed safety was not No. 1,” Roth said, noting that several astronauts since have expressed concern that pressure to meet launching schedules might have compromised flight safety.

Friends and acquaintances, who have detected an uncharacteristic steeliness and cautious reserve in Morgan at some of her public appearances, say that sometimes they don’t recognize the woman on the television screen. And that worries them.

“I get concerned that she will become hardened because she is always having to be ‘on’ and showing the ‘right stuff’ and saying the right thing . . . when perhaps she, too, is wondering what’s really going on with NASA,” said Ellen Hibbs, 26, a first-grade teacher at the school. “Barb’s always been real positive about NASA, but I would think she could be saying, ‘Look NASA, you screwed up and seven people died and I want some explanation.’ ”

Morgan, however, maintains that she remains unchanged through it all.

“I don’t think how losing seven friends can harden a person,” she said. “I have my time to feel bad . . . and I believe in the program.”