Word: flighting
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Think Americans stuck in airports have to wait a long time for a flight? Try 22 years. That's how long astronaut Barbara Morgan, 55 - who blasted off Wednesday aboard the shuttle Endeavour for a planned 11-day mission - had to cool her heels before she got her first chance...
...explosion of the shuttle Challenger. The fact that she's now in space is a tribute to her tenacity - to say nothing of her courage - as well as to NASA's often artful ability to include a compelling storyline in what would otherwise be a routine space flight. What it says less about - as is so often the case with the NASA of the last generation - is the value of the shuttles themselves and the current state of the manned space program...
...Teacher in Space program was a creature of NASA's arguably naive, 1980s belief that, with a fleet of sturdy shuttles, space flight could become a wonderfully routine thing. Former Utah Senator Jake Garn snagged himself a seat on one flight - never mind that he spent much of the mission so violently space sick that NASA wags informally added a whole new category, labeled "Garn," to the sliding scale used for diagnosing nausea in orbit. Then Congressman (now Senator) Bill Nelson of Florida spent six days in space aboard the shuttle Columbia in January of 1986, the same month Challenger...
Morgan nonetheless stayed with the agency, serving as a roving ambassador for space flight and remaining, in name at least, a Teacher in Space designee. Under NASA's newer, stricter flight eligibility rules, however, the only way she could ever get her chance to fly would be to quit the teaching profession and become a professional astronaut, relegating kids' education from space to a much more incidental part of her responsibilities. She applied for a slot and in 1998 was selected; she is now flying as a mission specialist, responsible for operating the robotic arm of both the shuttle...
Sounds like a success story, and in some ways it is. But in the service of what? This is the 119th flight of a space shuttle, the 20th for Endeavour and the 22nd overall to the ISS, a still-growing orbiting outpost that is more or less the only reason any of the shuttles fly anymore. The Endeavour crew will be delivering a two-ton truss segment that will help hold solar arrays and will require three risky spacewalks to install. If the ISS were doing good science at an arguably reasonable price, those risks would be worth taking...