Lift off for teacher

A teacher who was on standby for the fateful Challenger mission 21 years ago is scheduled to finally blast into space on Wednesday.

The launch of the space shuttle Endeavour has been delayed by a day, due to unexpected work to fix a leak in the crew cabin, but 55-year-old Barbara Morgan has been waiting for this opportunity for years.

She originally trained alongside - and was on standby for - the first "Teacher in Space", Christa McAuliffe, killed alongside six other astronauts when the Challenger shuttle exploded 73 seconds after lift off in 1986.

Now Ms Morgan is due to fly aboard Endeavour on a construction and resupply mission to the International Space Station.

After the 1986 tragedy Nasa asked Ms Morgan to serve as its Teacher in Space but then a policy change banned civilians from flying on the shuttle.

So, a decade ago, she quit her job teaching in McCall, Idaho, joined the astronaut corps and became a fully trained member of the crew, the first of a new category of astronauts called education-mission specialists. Three more teachers are now astronauts.

"After the Challenger accident, we had school kids all over the world looking at adults and watching what adults do in a bad situation and I felt it was really important to show them that adults do the right thing," said Ms Morgan.

"I'm personally very excited about going into space, but that's not my motivation. I'm here because of that and because I'm a schoolteacher," she said.

Most of her time in space will be spent operating the shuttle's robot arm and shuffling cargo to and from the station. She also plans to help develop a classroom curriculum from her experiences after her return.

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