Teacher in Space: Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Legacy by Colin Burgess

Author:Colin Burgess [Burgess, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Teacher in Space Program
Published: 2014-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

Learning the Ropes

You learn things so that you can understand the shuttle. But it's not like I have to figure out how it was put together.

For Christa the most difficult part about astronaut training was the separation from her family, although it helped that Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, and Ron McNair had their own families quartered in nearby communities. She got to know all of them and in particular June Scobee, who was also a teacher. They became good friends.

In addition to her official spaceflight training program, Christa carried out her own exercise regime, running several kilometers most days.

As part of her training she underwent a dizzying flight with Dick Scobee in one of NASA's T-38 jet aircraft while Barbara Morgan was paired in another with pilot Mike Smith. Apart from essential ejection seat training, it was necessary to place the trainees in the stressful environment of a narrow cockpit while enduring some high-G aerobatics.

The two teachers were flown through maneuvers, which gave them the chance to experience around five G'S or the equivalent of five times their own body weight. During a shuttle takeoff, they would undergo 3.5 G's. Christa was told that if these aerobatics or the high-G forces caused her extreme discomfort, then she wasn't ready to go into space.

As it turned out her reactions were quite normal under the circumstances, and Dick Scobee did not feel she was overstressed at any time.

He and Smith would tell their backseat passenger when they were about to break the sound barrier or do a barrel roll or some other "breaking in" maneuver. The two teachers coped well and were even permitted to take the controls for a time and put the T-38s through some rolls and dives. Once again there were no problems, and both students were elated.

Further parabolic flights aboard NASA'S KC-135 aircraft were scheduled, and both were keen to conduct some simple tests during the short periods of weightlessness, as Christa later revealed. "We were at first trying to be very serious. I said to Barbara, 'Let's get acclimatized on the first parabola. Then we can see how our experiments will work in zero G.' But then it was hard to stay serious. Leapfrog? Why not? We figured kids would love to see that. But there were these serious NASA people there. I don't think a lot of them would leapfrog on a KC-135!"

It was not all fun and games; there were some essential things they had to learn during these brief periods of weightlessness, such as how to eat and drink without the aid of gravity. They quickly learned that simple everyday activities have to be done differently when the force of gravity is removed.

Christa flew three times aboard the "Vomit Comet." She and Barbara Morgan were also involved in a packed program of self-education, including long, intense simulations and emergency procedures, even down to such requirements as the operation of a sixteen millimeter camera that they would be using in space. Dozens of manuals had to be studied and a host of duties learned.

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