Teacher Still Eager for Space Flight : Exploration: Despite the Challenger tragedy five years ago, an Idaho woman hopes NASA revives a plan for her to conduct classes from a shuttle.

She was Christa McAuliffe’s backup, a slight, soft-spoken schoolteacher from Idaho who became NASA’s Teacher in Space designate after the Challenger disaster.

Five years later, Barbara Morgan is as eager as ever to conduct classes from orbit. She must wait, though, for NASA to resume its program of sending ordinary folks like herself into space, something officials are reluctant to do.

“I’ve seen everything that could happen, as you know, and I’m still ready to go,” said Morgan, 39, a third-grade teacher in McCall, Ida., and mother of two toddlers.

“You judge the risks of things and you decide what is and isn’t important,” she said. “To me, it’s very important to fly for education.”

NASA’s Teacher in Space program has been on hold since the shuttle Challenger blew up shortly after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. Seven were killed, including McAuliffe, a Concord, N.H., high school teacher who beat out 11,000 other educators to become America’s first private citizen to head into space.

Agency officials will meet sometime during the next few months, as they have every year since the tragedy, to decide whether it is time to send up another teacher.

It is agreed that Morgan will be that person, if and when the time comes.

Whether a journalist will follow, as had been planned before the accident, is uncertain.

NASA Deputy Administrator J. R. Thompson is among those who oppose sending up more private citizens--called space flight participants--unless they are essential to the mission. On the last shuttle flight, for example, two astronomers who are not professional astronauts helped operate an observatory aboard Columbia. They also conducted a live science lesson for middle-school students.

“Personally, knowing the shuttle as well as I do, I don’t believe it’s in order at all,” Thompson said. “It’s still a very risky business.”

Thompson’s view was reinforced by a Japanese journalist’s visit to the Soviet space station Mir last month. The TV newsman’s station paid $12 million for the ride.

“It was more of a stunt than anything else,” Thompson said.

To Morgan, the fact that space flight is so risky is all the more reason to send teachers and other non-astronauts.

“We must show our children and our students what’s important,” she said. “Young people don’t really see adults crossing the continent in a covered wagon or sailing across the Atlantic in a leaky boat. They just see it (taking risks) on TV, bluff and bluster.

“As dangerous as it is, as much of a new frontier that it is, it belongs to everyone.”