An Astronaut's Long Road to Space

In two weeks, astronaut Barbara Morgan is due to board the shuttle Endeavour for a mission to the International Space Station – a little more than two decades after she watched her friend and fellow teacher Christa McAuliffe, along with six other astronauts, perish in the fatal Challenger disaster. Morgan was the runner-up in the first-teacher-to-space contest won by McAuliffe, so they ended up training together for six months, and becoming close friends. Since NASA then instituted a policy barring civilians from shuttle flights, the determined Morgan entered the space-flight program, and, after a dozen years of training, officially became an astronaut in 1998. Watch a CBS piece on the driven, courageous teacher-turned-astronaut here.—Gregory Mone