In fact, NASA has gone far beyond the brief training McAuliffe and Morgan got for Challenger. Morgan is a full-fledged astronaut now, and the space agency plans to accept a few more teachers into the astronaut corps early next year.

Morgan, who is helping with the teacher selection, insists she hasn't had a single second thought about flying in space since the Columbia tragedy.

She didn't after the Challenger accident, either.

``It all goes back to what we are doing and why we are doing it, and space exploration is very, very important,'' Morgan told The Associated Press. ``It's important to us as human beings and, certainly from my point of view as a teacher, it's crucial for our kids and for the future. In any bad situation, you figure out what you're going to do to try to make things better and go forward.''

Children need to see adults doing the right thing, she believes, and that means making the three remaining shuttles safer and taking classroom education into space, despite the risk.

In one of her first interviews since the February disaster, Morgan found it difficult last week to talk about the shock and anguish she felt when Columbia broke apart over Texas. She offered a quiet and brief recollection in a small conference room at Johnson Space Center that was filled with photographs of the former president from Texas, LBJ.

Morgan was in the shuttle training aircraft that Saturday morning, flying over the Florida touchdown site, observing the landing weather and awaiting Columbia's arrival. The next time Columbia took off, in November, she would be on board, bound for the international space station.

Her excitement and anticipation swiftly disintegrated into grief. Almost 17 years to the day of the Challenger launch explosion, she found herself once again consoling the wives, husbands, children and parents of seven dead astronauts.

``It's just like after Challenger,'' said Morgan, a slender, soft-spoken woman who turns 52 later this month. ``People kept asking, 'Gee, aren't you glad it wasn't you.' I do get that question and I get this question this time, 'Gee, that was your ship.'

``And I can tell you none of those thoughts went through my mind at all. I mean, all you're doing is thinking about the people and the families and what we can do to make things better.''

On Jan. 28, 1986, Morgan was atop a small concrete building next to the Kennedy Space Center press stands, and she scrambled down and ran frantically toward the large countdown clock when Challenger burst into a fireball barely a minute into flight. McAuliffe, a bubbly 37-year-old New Hampshire schoolteacher, perished along with six others.

Morgan was a close friend of them all. She had worked and trained alongside McAuliffe for the previous half-year; if McAuliffe got sick or injured before the flight, Morgan would have stepped in.

On Feb. 1, Morgan was aboard the shuttle training aircraft with chief astronaut Kent Rominger and two other crew who were in radio contact with Mission Control. At first, Columbia's loss of communication did not worry her; brief blackouts sometimes happen during re-entry. But as the silence stretched from seconds into minutes, she feared the worst.

By the time the training plane landed, Morgan knew Columbia and its crew were gone. She didn't need to hear Mission Control declaring an emergency or see TV pictures of the raining wreckage 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away. She just knew, and she rushed to the Kennedy crew quarters to be with the Columbia astronaut families.

Nine months later, Morgan speaks in a strained voice to describe that day.

``I don't have a whole lot to say about it, except it was horrible,'' she said. ``More than anything, it's really, really sad.''

By nightfall, she was back home in Houston and grieving with her husband, Clay Morgan, an author, and their two teenage sons, both born after Challenger. All three, as well as other family members, remain ``fully supportive'' of her space quest. She says the families of the Challenger Seven and Columbia Seven do, too.

Grace Corrigan, McAuliffe's mother, however, has some misgivings.

It would be too much for children to bear, Corrigan says, if they had to watch Morgan or another teacher die aboard a shuttle.

``Oh, good heavens, could you imagine? She was even scheduled to go up on the Columbia,'' Corrigan said. ``But that's her choice and I'm supportive of Barbara. I love her and whatever she wants to do, of course, but she is an astronaut now so it's a different category.''

Back in 1985, when McAuliffe and Morgan were selected as the two top candidates for NASA's teacher in space program, their shuttle training in Houston lasted a mere five months.

When Morgan finally was invited to join NASA in 1998, she moved from McCall, Idaho, to Houston, and four years of training passed before she was assigned to a space station construction mission. Her launch date was Nov. 13, 2003, aboard Columbia.

While Columbia circled Earth in January with, unknown to the space agency, a deadly gash in its left wing, Morgan joined NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe in launching a program to recruit more teachers as astronauts.

The requirements: teachers of kindergarten through 12th grade who have bachelor's degrees in education, engineering, math or science, and who are U.S. citizens and have taught for at least three of the past four years.

Morgan has a biology degree from Stanford University.

NASA received 1,100 completed applications from teachers by the April deadline. That has been whittled down to about 35 candidates, said Duane Ross, head of the astronaut selection office. About three teachers will make the cut, along with about nine pilots, scientists, engineers and doctors.

Morgan likes to point out that NASA has expanded its astronaut-selection criteria only twice, in 1965 to allow scientists to join its cadre of test pilots, and now to open the door to teachers.

``It gives us a broader base,'' Ross said, and it addresses a desire to make education a key part of the space business.

The courage it takes to enter a school with metal detectors at the doors every day is the same courage it takes to strap into a rocketship, according to Morgan. The commitment is also the same.

Sure, children ask her if she will be afraid to fly in space. She tells them she'll be ``really, really alert on the launch pad just as everybody else is. But at least for me, I made those decisions a long time ago, pre- and post-Challenger.''

And now, pre- and post-Columbia.

Morgan realizes that when she flies -- perhaps in 2005 or 2006 -- she'll be regarded by the public as a teacher, not an astronaut. That's fine with her; after a few space missions, she plans to be back in the classroom.

Already, she's planning a heart-to-heart with the nation's schoolchildren. ``Just like I'll tell my own children, if anything happens, this is really important what we're trying to do. I would certainly hope that people would carry it on and that there would be many more opportunities to explore the universe.''