Irene Klotz

Of all the wonders and surprises Barbara Morgan has experienced since reaching orbit 13 days ago, nothing compared to the biggest jolt of all: coming home.

Gravity did not sit pretty on the pale but happy teacher-turned-astronaut, who just a few hours after landing already was laying plans for taking her experiences into the classroom.

First though, there will be a reunion with her family and hopefully a good night’s sleep to shake off the dizziness that often comes to those who breach the bonds of gravity and then re-subject themselves to its unbending force.

The first clue that Barbara was finding Earth harder to adapt to than space came about an hour after Endeavour’s flawless touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida midday Tuesday. Her six crewmates climbed out of the medical van to take a short walk around the shuttle and greet the dozens of NASA officials and friends who had gathered at the runway to welcome them home. Barb stayed beind.

"This was Barbara's first flight. She was feeling just a little bit under the weather,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who was among the officials greeting the crew at the runway, told reporters.”

“She was doing just fine, but she wasn’t able to stand up and walk around out in Florida heat. Having stood up and walked around out there in the Florida heat, I was about ready to join her,” he added.

Four hours later Barbara mustered her resolve, tucked her hair inside a red baseball cap and fixed her head as straight as possible to join her crewmates for a short press conference.

“My first plan is to get rid of the room spinning, and that should happen pretty soon,” Barbara said. " It's actually pretty interesting if you could be in my body.”

Obviously struggling for balance, Barb gutted it through the briefing, closing her eyes periodically and turning her head as little as possible, but clearly still entranced by the experience of being in space.

I asked her if she felt changed in any way. “It’s a great sense of pride to be able to be involved in a human endeavor that takes us all a little bit farther," she said. "When you look down and see our Earth ... and you realize what we are trying to do as a human race, it's pretty profound."

The astronauts on shuttle Endeavour must be feeling a bit cramped today, with seven people floating around the small crew cabin after enjoying nine days aboard the sprawling International Space Station. But you won't hear any complaints. Besides, by now even the first-time fliers, like teacher Barbara Morgan, have long since learned how to make full use of the ceilings and walls.

There's still some packing up to do, but the crew enjoyed a few hours time off for planet-watching and other recreational activities. Soaring 214 miles above the planet, they caught sight of Hurricane Dean, the massive storm that is prompting NASA to end the mission a day early.

Managers are concerned the powerful storm, which is blasting into the Gulf of Mexico with its 145-mph winds, could force an evacuation of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which operates the shuttle during flight.

Weather in Florida is looking good for a change and if conditions hold, Barbara will be testing her land legs for the first time in 13 days on Tuesday. Touchdown is scheduled for about 12:32 p.m. Eastern time.

If storm stays on its present track however and veers south of Texas, NASA could decide to keep the shuttle in orbit for a few extra days if weather or technical issues prevent a Florida touchdown on Tuesday. Landing at the backup site in California adds a few weeks time to prepare the shuttle for a cross-country piggyback ride on top of a specially modified jet aircraft, which NASA would rather not have to do.

Before the astronauts' time-off, they unfolded the shuttle's robot arm, doubled its length with a laser- and camera-tipped extension boom and for a third time since reaching orbit, scanned their ship's heat shield for any damage that could pose a hazard during the superheated descent through the atmosphere. Traveling at 25 times the speed of sound, the shuttle's outer surfaces get as hot as the surface of the sun. The ceramic tiles and carbon wing panels keep the ship's aluminum frame intact during the ride through the atmosphere.

The shuttle is returning with a small divot in two of its belly tiles, but NASA says it is 100 percent sure the damage will not pose a threat to the crew or the shuttle during re-entry.
The crew's last day in space will be spent testing out all the equipment needed for landing and packing away any equipment and items that are still floating around the crew cabin.

Barb will be getting an eyeful on the ride home. She's upgraded her launch seat in the window-less mid-deck for one on the flight deck, which is filled with windows.

 After a tedious six-day review Barbara Morgan and her crewmates aboard shuttle Endeavour learned that the best brains at NASA believe the spaceship is safe to fly through the atmosphere without fixing a tiny but deep cut carved into two heat-resistant tiles on the ship’s belly.

 The tiles protect the ship from the fierce temperatures of atmosphere re-entry when the shuttle leaves orbit and heads back home.

 After all the analysis, computer simulations and laboratory tests, the vote was unanimous that the damage would not comprise the shuttle or crew’s safety. One group of engineers, however, believed NASA should go ahead and have spacewalkers fill the gap with a special putty to add an extra buffer.

 In the end, managers decided the risks of the spacewalk were greater than the risk of additional damage to the shuttle.

 "We have a lot of faith in the program and we'll do what the engineers decide is the best thing for us to do,” Barbara said during an in-flight interview. “We have all confidence we're going to be able to do the right thing."

 Her commander Scott Kelly said, “We agree absolutely 100 percent with the decision to not repair the damage. There was a lot of engineering rigor put into making this decision, it took some time but that was because there was a lot of testing going on … So even though a repair could potentially provide a little bit more margin, there is certainly more risk in doing the repair than we're willing to take. We were certainly concerned that if we did the repair we could potentially cause more damage to the underside of the orbiter.

 Heat shield damage is what triggered the loss of Columbia and its seven-member crew in 2003, so the issue is an emotional one. NASA developed a host of in-flight inspection tools, repair kits and other options to give astronauts more options in case of serious heat shield damage.

 The 3.5-inch long gouge on Endeavour, however, is only expected to raise the temperature of the underlying aluminum skin by 40 degrees Fahrenheit (the normal temperature in that area during re-entry is up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.)

 No sooner did NASA put the heat shield issue to bed, then it was faced with a new threat: Hurricane Dean, a monster storm chugging its way toward the Gulf of Mexico.

 Barbara’s mission may end a day early, as NASA scrambles to batten down the hatches at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which may be forced to evacuate. There’s an emergency mission control center that could be set up for the shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but managers would rather try to get the shuttle home before the storm hits.

 In an interview, Barbara told me that she has been busy documenting and absorbing as much as possible about what’s going on around her aboard the shuttle and the space station so that she can come up with more ideas about how to turn the spaceflight experience into hands-on activities for schoolchildren.

 She certainly will have a lot of adventures to choose from.

It was a moment more than 21 years in the making. School children at an educational center set up by the families of the lost Challenger crew speaking, at long last, to a teacher in orbit.

"Barb, we've been standing by waiting for your signal from space for 21 years," June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger commander Dick Scobee, told shuttle Endeavour astronaut Barbara Morgan.

June heads the Challenger Center for Space Science Education and she spoke to Barbara from the institute’s Alexandria, Va., location. With her were dozens of children who had a long list of questions about life in space for Barbara and her crewmate, Alvin Drew.

Barbara, a teacher who joined the astronaut corps, originally trained as the backup to Dick Scobee’s crewmate, Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher selected by NASA to fly on the shuttle as part of a public outreach program called Teacher-in-Space.

When a launch accident claimed the crew, Barbara agreed to continue with the program in the hopes that one day NASA would again fly a teacher on the shuttle.

"It made me so happy to know the Challenger Center was there, that we had a chance to speak with the kids this morning, that June was there leading the charge as always," Barbara told me in an in-flight interview after the event. "It's in our hearts and it's wonderful."

In spite of the shuttle program’s two fatal accidents, Barbara said she’d still give the program an “A-plus.”

"This work is incredibly challenging,” she said. “Once we don't have the shuttle any more I think it's going to be something that we all look back on with great nostalgia and we're really, really going to miss it.”

The wake-up call this morning may have left Barbara Morgan’s crewmates scratching their heads, but she knew who it was. The astronauts’ eighth day in space began with a tune written and recorded by Morgan’s son Adam.

The proud mom didn’t have much time for beaming. Barbara and the rest of the shuttle Endeavour crew had another spacewalk to get ready for. This time it was the flight engineer, Rick Mastracchio, heading out the station’s airlock for his third spacewalk of the mission, paired with the U.S. space station resident crewmember, Clay Anderson, a lively, loquacious Nebraskan who likes to work the phrase “canned corn” into his banter as much as possible.

Barbara’s job during the planned 6.5-hour outing was to maneuver the shuttle’s robot arm so good TV pictures of the men would be available as much as possible. This is not done for the millions of arm-chair astronauts who enjoy living vicariously. Keeping a watchful eye on the spacewalkers could be a matter of life or death.

Take Wednesday’s spacewalk for example. It started off smoothly, with Rick and Clay floating out the station’s airlock early. They had a few different tasks to get a solar array segment ready for its move in October when the next shuttle arrives with a connecting node for the station’s new laboratories.

They took down part of a communications antenna, then picked up the first of two work carts that needed to be moved to the other side of the station’s rail system. After the second cart was relocated, the astronauts checked their gloves for tears, a routine part of spacewalks since damage was discovered after a spacewalk at the outpost in December.

And then the unexpected news from Rick, reporting a small hole in the outer layer of his left glove.

Following flight rules, he was told to go back to the station’s airlock and hook up his suit to the station’s power, ending his work shift a couple of hours early. To add insult to injury, flight directors needed him to shut the thermal cover on the hatch door to keep the temperature within its proper range, so he couldn't even look out.

He floated alone in the small chamber, waiting for Clay to finish up some work at the top of the station’s outer left truss segment. For added safety, NASA likes to have its spacewalkers work in pairs, so Rick’s glove problem cut short Clay’s outing too.

There was only one job they didn’t get to -- bringing in two experiments -- but the shortened spacewalk was a disappointment nonetheless. The damage to the glove also adds another issue for NASA engineers to resolve. In addition to deciding if the shuttle’s slightly damaged heat shield needs to be repaired in orbit, engineers will be working around the clock to figure out how the glove was torn and if it is safe to continue as planned with the fourth spacewalk of the mission, which has been rescheduled for Saturday.

On a brighter note, Barbara is scheduled for another round of chats with school kids, this time organized by the educational institute established by the widow of the Challenger crew’s cammander. Barbara trained with the Challenger astronauts as the backup to Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe. She stayed with NASA for 21 years to continue Christa’s mission.

A long last, Barbara Morgan got to do something she’s been looking forward to for more than two decades: talk to students from space.

She and three astronauts fielded questions from children gathered at the Discovery Center of Idaho, Barbara’s home state. They kept the kids laughing with orbital demonstrations of drinking in space, chasing a slow-moving baseball and microgravity juggling.

Ever the teacher, Barbara managed to squeeze in a quick science lecture when one student asked her about operating the shuttle’s robot arm.

“A really big challenge is trying to keep yourself steady, because as you probably know from Newton’s law, ‘Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,’ she said, demonstrating how her body floats up when she pivoted a control stick. “You’ve got to learn to really restrain yourself and hold yourself down with foot loops,” Barbara said.

Nine years of training in the astronaut corps couldn’t prepare her for the way she felt in space, especially during the first few days of the mission. “It was pretty much a big surprise for me the very first day when the whole day I felt like I was upside-down. There’s just no preparing for that. It’s just something you experience and enjoy and get used to,” she said.

Even though Barbara had to give up classroom teaching to become an astronaut, she said there really wasn’t much difference between the two jobs. “Astronauts and teachers actually do the same thing,” she said. “We explore, we discover and we share. The great thing about being a teacher is that you get to do that with students. And the great thing about being an astronaut is that you get to do it in space. Those are absolutely wonderful jobs.”

Dear Principal,

Please excuse Barbara Morgan from class. She definitely will be missing the start of school as her space shuttle mission has been extended to two weeks.

In celebration of an extra three days in orbit, Barbara took a bit of a breather from her job as “loadmaster” -- chief schlep for overseeing the transfer of 5,000 pounds of cargo to and from the space station -- to lend a hand to her spacewalking crewmates on Monday.

Barb took control of the shuttle’s robot arm so its TV cameras could beam good shots of Rick Mastracchio and Dave Williams replacing one of the station’s gyroscopes. There are four gyros aboard, which spin like tops to keep the outpost properly positioned in orbit without the need for gas-burning rocket thrusters.

It’s expensive to haul fuel -- or anything for that matter -- into space and the station needs to be properly oriented to gather solar energy for its electrical system. One of the 600-pound gyroscopes has been having problems, so NASA sent a new one up on shuttle Endeavour.

Barbara will be having another workout on the shuttle’s arm on Tuesday when she pulls out a platform used to store gear outside the station from Endeavour’s cargo bay and mounts it to the station’s backbone.

She’ll also have her first opportunity to talk to children from her space classroom aboard Endeavour. The event, which takes place at 2:09 p.m. Pacific time, will be with the Discovery Center of Boise, Idaho, which is Barbara’s home state.

During Monday’s spacewalk, NASA managers discussed what to do about the heat shield damage spotted on Endeavour’s belly just before the ship pulled into its parking slip at the International Space Station on Friday. There’s no threat to the crew or the shuttle, but managers are considering having spacewalkers patch the small hole to prevent additional damage during Endeavour’s high-speed flight through the atmosphere for landing.

As mission management team leader John Shannon put it, if spacewalkers can spend three or four hours in flight making a repair that could save 12 weeks of inspections, analysis and repairs on the ground, why not do it?

No decision yet, though.

If there was ever any doubt that one-time teacher Barbara Morgan has had a career change, it ended on Sunday. For three painstaking, tedious hours, she flew the shuttle’s robotic arm over damage sites on her space shuttle’s heat shield so engineers could assess if any repairs will be needed before the ship is cleared to return to Earth next week.

“I know it was long and harrowing,” astronaut Chris Ferguson from Mission Control in Houston told the shuttle Endeavour crew when the task was finally complete. “Thanks for all your hard work.”

Helping Barbara with the arm operations were crewmates Tracy Caldwell and commander Scott Kelly. NASA managers told the Endeavour astronauts to make a second inspection of their ship’s heat shield after photographs taken by the space station crew prior to Endeavour’s docking on Friday showed a potentially deep gash in a tile located beneath the right wing.

The ceramic tiles protect the orbiter’s aluminum skin from melting during the fiery plunge back through Earth’s atmosphere prior to landing.

The laser data and images taken during Barbara’s scans will be analyzed to determine if spacewalking astronauts will need to patch the tile’s hole to make sure the shuttle won’t overheat during re-entry. A major heat shield breach is what doomed the Columbia crew in 2003.

Even if it turns out Endeavour is OK to land as is, NASA now faces a thorny question: Should it risk flying three more missions until a new tank that fixes the problem seen during Endeavour’s flight is ready?

With the shuttles retiring in three years and at least 11 more shuttle flights needed to finish building the space station, NASA will have a lot to wrestle with before it decides whether to fly its next shuttle mission in October.

Barbara Morgan can be forgiven if she never wants to hear these words again: “transfer” and “stowage.”

Hauling more than 5,000 pounds of cargo to and from the space station kept the teacher-turned-astronaut pretty much out sight on Saturday. The communications lines were tied up with the first spacewalk of the mission, which occupied five of Barbara’s six shuttle crewmates. That left Al Drew as Barb’s prime partner in the seemingly endless task of unpacking and putting stuff away.

She’ll return to the flight deck of the shuttle on Sunday to help out with another inspection of Endeavour’s heat shield. A bad bounce of a piece of falling foam caused some damage to one of the shuttle’s ceramic belly tiles.

Shuttles have returned with far worse damage throughout the program’s 26-year history, but NASA takes no chances since losing the Columbia crew in 2003. With cameras and other sensors to scrutinize every inch of the ship if necessary, engineers can compute detailed assessments of how hot an area may get during atmospheric re-entry and whether any repairs may be needed to ward off structural damage that could comprise the shuttle’s safety.

It’s doubtful anything will need to be done about the gouge on Endeavour’s damaged tile, says John Shannon, the deputy shuttle program manager. But Barb and her crewmate Tracy Caldwell will run the sensor boom over the damage site just to be sure.

Barbara Morgan has taken pains to redirect the limelight that follows her every move to her crewmates, her trainers, other teachers and especially to children. But there was no escaping the paparazzi-class welcome she received upon boarding the International Space Station on Friday.

With the station’s three crewmembers gathered in welcome and with five of her own shuttle companions already aboard, Barbara floated through the hatch to find an orbital paparazzi in waiting. Between flashes of light bulbs, the astronauts swarmed around each other angling for the best shot of Barbara’s entrance into the station’s Destiny module.

It was over almost as quickly as it started, the crew keenly aware of how much work lies ahead. The job list grew even longer, with another inspection of the shuttle’s heat shield now scheduled for Sunday after engineers discovered a small gouge in one of the ship’s protective tiles.

NASA has been scrupulous about checking for heat shield damage since losing shuttle Columbia and seven astronauts on Feb. 1, 2003. The shuttle had been hit by a piece of foam insulation that fell off the fuel tank during liftoff. The wedge broke heat panels on Columbia’s left wing and as the ship attempted to fly back through the atmosphere for landing, it was torn apart.

The damage on Endeavour may prove to be harmless, but NASA won’t know until it determines the gouge’s depth. The damage is believed to have been caused by a piece of ice that formed on the outside of the shuttle fuel tank before or during launch. The tank can form ice and frost because the propellants it holds to feed the shuttle’s main engines during the climb to orbit are well below freezing.

If engineers determine Endeavour’s heat shield is not safe for the journey back to Earth, spacewalking astronauts could patch the damaged tile during one of the three or four spacewalks planned during the flight.