Teacher's Shuttle Voyage Fulfils Dream

More than two decades after witnessing fellow schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe's fiery death in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, Barbara Morgan returned to the Cape Canaveral launchpad yesterday to speak of fulfilling her friend's destiny during her own journey into space.

Ms Morgan, McAuliffe's understudy for the 1986 mission that exploded shortly after lift-off, killing all seven astronauts on board, went back to the classroom when Nasa's Teacher in Space program was scrapped after the tragedy. The elementary school teacher from McCall, Idaho, was summoned again to the agency's Houston headquarters in 1998 and will achieve a 21-year-old dream when she flies aboard the shuttle Endeavor on a 14-day mission scheduled for August 7.

"I'll be flying as an astronaut but with the eyes, ears, heart and mind of a teacher," said Ms Morgan, 55, who was at Florida's Kennedy Space Center with her six crew mates for last-minute tests and preparations. "I can't think of anything more important than our young kids and their future, and what space offers is an open-ended, never-ending land of opportunities."

The mission is rich in symbolism for Ms Morgan, who noted that she will be flying aboard the spacecraft commissioned in 1989 as the replacement for Challenger and appropriately named Endeavor in a competition for schoolchildren.

She said the mission to the international space station, only the sixth US manned spaceflight since the shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003, killing seven more astronauts, was also an opportunity to show children how to deal with adversity. "We had school kids all over the country and all over the world looking at adults to see what they do in a bad situation and I thought it was important to show these children that we do the right thing, work out what was wrong, try to fix it and keep the future open," she said.

During the mission Ms Morgan will operate the shuttle's robotic arm to help spacewalkers David Williams and Richard Mastracchio complete repairs and install support trusses to the orbiting space station.

But she said her favorite part would be the "fun" tasks that she hopes will inspire children in the same way that McAuliffe's selection as the first teacher in space did a generation ago. "We'll be taking up 10m basil seeds and distributing them after the flight and getting kids thinking about how are we going to feed people, not just for camping trips to the moon but for long space flight," she said.

"We want kids to get their hands on something real and physical, to explore, discover, learn and share. We are hoping it will put the seed in people's minds, pardon the pun, about finishing the space station, going back to the moon and eventually on to Mars."

Endeavor's flight is one of the last shuttle missions before the aging fleet is retired in 2010.