Young fighter jocks and scientists will have to make some room in space for more down-to-Earth folks.
NASA on Friday assigned 76-year-old Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) to an October space shuttle flight to study the effects of space on aging and said an Idaho elementary school teacher, Barbara Morgan, will be a full-fledged astronaut.
Morgan was at the launch site as the Teacher in Space backup when the Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from New Hampshire.
The Teacher in Space program was put on hold after the disaster.
But Morgan stayed with the program, underwent annual astronaut physicals and, until cutting back last fall to spend more time in the classroom, traveled one week a month on education and public relations duties for the space agency.
“What Christa was trying to do then has not changed. All of that is really important. And that’s part of my motivation for making sure it still happens,” Morgan said. “Every year we have a new generation of classroom students. Every year there’s more for us to learn about our universe.”
By its actions Friday, NASA opened space shuttle doors to a new type of space traveler: the average Joe.
Or, that is, to the average Joe with a graduate degree and experience in a spaceship, the Senate or the classroom.
“The door is beginning to crack open again,” Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan said.
Age doesn’t seem to matter much anymore to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which a year ago told 61-year-old Story Musgrave he couldn’t fly again.
At a news conference with Glenn on Friday, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said, “The man who almost 36 years ago climbed into the Friendship 7 and showed the boundless promise for a new generation is now poised to show the world that senior citizens have the right stuff. This is not a flight of fancy, this is a flight for the future.”
Glenn shared the stage with a huge poster of himself in his space-suited glory days, when he was one of the seven original astronauts.
“I see this as another adventure into the unknown,” he said. He will be a “payload specialist” on the flight, when he will be 77.
He will be a human guinea pig again. But instead of finding out if people can breathe in orbit, this time Glenn will help test the effects of space on sleep and muscle loss, problems the elderly experience.
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“We are expanding the reach of the astronaut program,” Goldin said. “We are going to encourage Americans from many different experiences to apply.”