More teachers in space finally

NASA halted the TIS program after the Challenger disaster. Politicians and other were able to go aboard and take a ride and that rip. Barbara Morgan finally got the chance after 20 something years. Now more will be going.
Space
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/space/5234228.html

Oct. 22, 2007, 9:59AM
2 teacher-astronauts assigned to 2008 mission

By MARK CARREAU
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle TOOLS


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Two more of NASA's classroom teachers turned astronauts have been assigned to their first spaceflights.
Ricky Arnold and Joe Acaba, who left teaching posts three years ago to join NASA's astronaut corps, are among seven astronauts assigned to the same assembly mission to the international space station. Scheduled for the fall of 2008, the mission will deliver the last of four solar power modules to the orbital outpost.
Their assignment, announced on Friday, comes of the heels of NASA astronaut Barbara Morgan's August shuttle flight. Morgan, who served as the backup to NASA's teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe, flew after a 21-year wait. McAuliffe was among seven astronauts that perhished in the 1986 Challenger explosion.
Morgan,who resumed her teaching duties in McCall, Idaho, after the tragedy, was invited by NASA to train as a professional astronaut in 1998. A half-dozen years later, the space agency selected three more teachers to train for spaceflight.
Acaba joined the space agency after five years of teaching high school and middle school math and science in Florida.
Arnold was selected for astronaut training after teaching math and science in Romania, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
Astronaut Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, who joined NASA's astronaut corps as a high school astronomy and science instructor in Vancouver, Wash., awaits her first spaceflight assignment.