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Problem with NASA.<br /><br />http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1651390,00.html<br /><br />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 to fly.<br />Chosen as the back-up to the original teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe in 1985, Morgan was on site at Cape Canaveral the following year when McAuliffe and her six crewmates perished in the 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.<br /><br />The 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 blew up, causing NASA to decide that maybe space flight was a risky enough job that it indeed ought best be left to the professionals. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>