History
TISP was announced by President Ronald Reagan on August 27, 1984. More than 11,000 teachers applied for the program; in 1985, NASA selected Christa McAuliffe to be the first teacher in space with Barbara Morgan as her backup. McAuliffe died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (STS-51-L) in 1986.
After the Challenger accident, Reagan spoke on national television and assured the nation that the Teacher in Space program would continue. "We'll continue our quest in space", he said. "There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue." However, NASA eliminated the Teacher in Space project and other efforts to send private citizens to space. In the 1990s, the Teacher in Space project was replaced by the Educator Astronaut Project. Instead of training teachers for five months to be a spaceflight participant who would return to the classroom, the Educator Astronaut program required selectees to give up their teaching careers, move to Houston, and become full-time NASA employees.
Morgan was selected as a NASA Mission Specialist in January 1998, 12 years after McAuliffe's death. She was assigned to the crew of STS-118, aboard the orbiter Endeavour (the orbiter that replaced Challenger six years after the 1986 accident) which launched on August 8, 2007. Although it was once reported that Morgan would teach some of the same lessons that McAuliffe planned to teach more than 20 years before, Associated Press reports that "Morgan has no plans to give a lesson from space". Shuttle commander Scott Kelly told a journalist, "I don’t have a teacher as a crewmember. I have a crewmember who used to be a teacher". However, three weeks after the mission ended, she lectured a number of space education classes at Walt Disney World, lecturing lessons similar to what McAuliffe would have taught.
In 2010, David Pettersen contacted teacher in space participants and made a re-connection between Christa McAuliffe's 1986 mission and modern-day learning. Pettersen then began a search to find more people who were involved with Christa McAuliffe's life after being inspired by McAuliffe's original mission. Pettersen has also stated that he has no intent to ever become an astronaut or a teacher, but will remain a symbol of the student side of public education.
Read more about this topic: Teacher In Space Project
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