HOUSTON (AP) – A planned chat between teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan and students in Lynn was canceled Sunday as NASA scrambled to bring the space shuttle Endeavour home a day early.
Morgan, who was Christa McAuliffe’s backup on the tragic 1986 Challenger mission, had hoped to chat with the students at the Robert L. Ford NASA Explorer School Sunday morning.
That was scrapped as astronauts had to compress their schedule to get ready for the early trip home.
Endeavour undocked from the international space station a day early on Sunday as NASA kept a wary eye on Hurricane Dean. Space agency managers were worried the storm would move toward Houston and force them to evacuate to a smaller-staffed makeshift control center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The Endeavour crew prepared to land on Tuesday as a precaution.
School principal Claire Crane said students were disappointed but understood the situation. She said Morgan is scheduled to speak at the school after she returns to earth.
“We’re very flexible and understand we can’t predict hurricanes,” Crane said.
She said students were able to speak with two other astronauts who were not participating in the flight at the Kennedy Space Center, including Bill McArthur, who spent six months on the international space station.
She said the students, who ranged from first to eighth grade, were especially interested in finding out how astronauts take showers in space.
The students also heard from the mother of Christa McAuliffe. The shuttle crew had been at the orbiting outpost since Aug. 10. In that time, astronauts attached a new truss segment to the station, delivered cargo and replaced a failed gyroscope, which controls the station’s orientation.
A spacewalk on Saturday was shortened so the astronauts could wrap up their work at the station.
During that jaunt, the spacewalkers saw the eye of the enormous hurricane swirling in the Caribbean and expressed their amazement at the sight.
The astronauts also skipped flying around the station after undocking to take pictures of the complex, an exercise NASA likes crews to do if the schedule and fuel supply permit.
Although it was uncertain whether Dean, a Category 4 storm, might strike the Texas coastline later this week, NASA managers said it would be irresponsible not to cut the mission short, especially since most of the tasks had been completed.
On Jan. 28, 1986, Christa McAuliffe, then a teacher at Concord High School in Concord, N.H., was about to become the first teacher in space. Seventy-three seconds after the launch, Challenger exploded and McAuliffe was killed along with six other crew members.
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