Over two decades after Christa McAuliffe's doomed Challenger mission, her backup in the teacher-in-space program carried out the dream of an educator turning the space shuttle into a classroom.
Teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan took questions and spoke to hundreds of youngsters packed into the Discovery Center of Idaho in Boise, less than 150 km from the elementary school where Morgan taught before joining the astronaut corps.
One child wanted to know about exercising in space. In response, Morgan lifted the two large men floating alongside her, one in each hand, and pretended to be straining. Another youngster wanted to see a demonstration of drinking in space. Morgan and her colleagues obliged by squeezing bubbles from a straw in a drink pouch and swallowing the red blobs, which floated everywhere.
Morgan was also asked how being a teacher compared to being an astronaut.
"Astronauts and teachers actually do the same thing," she answered. "We explore, we discover and we share. And the great thing about being a teacher is you get to do that with students, and the great thing about being an astronaut is you get to do it in space, and those are absolutely wonderful jobs."
The Endeavour crew is halfway through their two-week mission to the international space station. The astronauts have completed most of their main goals, including attaching a new truss segment to the space station and replacing a gyroscope that helps control the station's orientation.
Astronauts Clay Anderson and Rick Mastracchio still plan to perform tasks to prepare one of the station's solar arrays to be moved to another spot on the orbiting outpost during a later mission.
Any repairs to Endeavour will be conducted during the shuttle's fourth spacewalk, scheduled for Friday. If more time is needed to prepare, NASA will keep the shuttle at the station longer and bump the spacewalk to Saturday.
The gouge discovered on Endeavour's underside was not considered a threat to the crew, but NASA was debating whether to send astronauts out to fix it in order to avoid time-consuming post-flight repairs.
The hole on space shuttle Columbia was considerably bigger and in a wing, which is exposed to higher temperatures than the 2,000 degrees that scorch the ship's underside during re-entry.
Even though the repair itself would be relatively simple, the astronauts would be wearing 140-kg spacesuits and carrying 70 kgs of tools that could bang into the shuttle and cause more damage. All spacewalks are hazardous, Shannon noted, and so NASA would not want to add more outside work unless it was absolutely necessary.
A piece of foam broke off of Endeavour's external fuel tank during the Aug. 8 liftoff. The debris, which may have contained some ice in it as well, weighed less than an ounce, and was 4 inches long, almost 4 inches wide and almost 2 inches deep. It peeled away from a bracket on the tank, fell against a strut lower on the tank, then shot into the shuttle's belly. It weighed less than an ounce.
These brackets, which hold in place the fuel lines that feed the tank, have shed foam more frequently since shuttle flights resumed following the 2003 Columbia disaster, Shannon said. Engineers speculate more ice could be forming on these brackets because the super-cold fuel is being loaded an hour earlier than before.
NASA is redesigning the brackets, but the new ones won't be ready until next year.
Source: China Daily/agencies
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