How long is twenty-one years ...?

How long is twenty-one years ...?

More than a lifetime for some of my friends, they were not even born 21 years ago.

21 years ago, I was still programming on my Apple IIe, and playing F-15 flight simulator on monochrome computer monitor.

How the world has changed ... beyond my wildest imagination in 1986 of how the world with the Cold War then would look like 21 years later.

Hence, the first time I read the news, it boggled my mind that US schoolteacher Barbara Morgan (Official NASA Astronaut Bio Data website : http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/morgan.html) got another chance after 21 years, having been selected as backup astronaut for NASA Teacher in Space Program in 1985.

The primary candidate on that tragic mission was Christa McAuliffe, and the mission was on the US Space Shuttle Challenger which exploded during ascent on 28 January 1986.

Barbara Morgan (left) and the late Christa McAuliffe (right) in a photo taken 21 years ago.

I was still in secondary school at that time, and I recalled the headlines and frontpage photo that must have been reported in every major paper around the world then.

It was a moment of awakening for me, hurling from boyhood fantasy into the real world, shattering the imaginations that had been stoked ever since I watched James Bond's Moonraker movie.

After the Challenger disaster, Barbara Morgan returned to teaching 2nd and 3rd grader in McCall-Donnelly Elementary (Idaho), but also continued to be part of NASA's Education Division to spread education on space.

In Jan 1998, she was selected as mission specialist, and reported at Johnson Space Center in August 1998 for a 2-year training.  Subsequently, she worked in various capacities before being shortlisted for STS-118 (NASA website on the mission : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts118/), scheduled to takeoff in US Space Shuttle Endeavour on August 8, 2007.

Inevitably, interviews with her will return to the Challenger tragedy in 1986.  This is what she has to say.

Christa’s legacy was open-ended, and is open-ended. Any teacher’s legacy is open-ended. I hope, and I know that people will be thinking about Christa and the Challenger crew and that’s a good thing and they’ll be thinking about many, many teachers and others who have worked very, very hard for 20 years to continue Christa’s and the rest of the Challenger crew’s work. I am just the next teacher of many to come, we’ve got three in training right now, and there will be more in the future, teachers who will fly as astronauts, so just, just one of a long step that will continue well into the future.

It is another evidence that all achievements today are made by humans standing on the shoulders of giants ... giants made of people building upon the work laid before by those who came before.