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Could a Washington Teacher Walk on the Moon? |
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Written On: July 21, 2006 |
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With back-to-back missions completed since the Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003, America's astronauts are looking forward to completing the International Space Station and going back to the moon and perhaps even Mars.
No one is more excited about that prospect than Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, a 31-year old science teacher from Vancouver’s Hudson Bay High School. She is one of 11 new astronauts who have completed two years of rigorous training.
Metcalf-Lindenburger is a 1997 Whitman College graduate with a degree in geology. A Colorado native, she attended the Walla Walla campus to run track and cross country and went on to Central Washington University to earn her teaching certificate. Dottie and her husband, Jason, were teachers in Vancouver. Jason now teaches in Houston.
“Mrs. M.L.,” as her earth science and astronomy students called her, became interested in becoming an astronaut when one of her students asked her how astronauts use the bathroom in space. Soon after that she saw a NASA posting for the educator-astronaut position. She applied, and the rest is history.
This current class of astronauts, known as NASA Group 19, includes three teachers. The new astronauts have completed two years of rigorous training, including land and water survival; but given the backlog of missions and the more than 100 astronauts at NASA, it is doubtful Metcalf-Lindenburger will be in space soon.
During a recent tour of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, she indicated astronauts are usually in the program for up to a decade before they are assigned a mission. For example, Barbara Morgan, an Idaho elementary school teacher and the alternative to Christa McAulliffe (the Maine teacher killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion), was scheduled to fly on the Columbia in 2003.
Morgan has been training at the Johnson Space Center since 1998, but her scheduled mission was postponed when her ship was lost. If things continue as scheduled, she would fly this year.
More than likely, by the time Metcalf-Lindenburger has her turn in space, the current shuttle will be retired and the International Space Station completed. NASA will be headed back to the moon or to Mars. With a little luck and America’s continued commitment to space, Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger could be the first woman to walk on the moon.
Meanwhile, she is busy learning to fly T-38 jets and learning Russian so she can communicate with the cosmonauts aboard the space station.
Metcalf-Lindenburger believes the space program is essential. It also involves some risk—risks that Dottie and others at NASA believe America has to take.
As a teacher-turned-astronaut, Metcalf-Lindenburger is teaching her former students – and all of us, really – an important life lesson: That pursuing your dream is never easy, but you can succeed if you have patience, commitment, courage, curiosity and a sense of adventure.
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