Thursday marks 30 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, which claimed the lives of all seven crew members — the most famous being social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first American civilian in space.
But if things had gone a little differently, that teacher would have been Barbara Morgan.
Morgan, then a 34-year-old elementary school teacher from Idaho, trained with McAuliffe and the rest of the Challenger astronauts as the backup “Teacher in Space.” On Jan. 28, 1986, after saying goodbye to the crew, she watched the launch from a tower about 3 miles away — and knew almost immediately that something was wrong.
“Christa and I had seen a launch . . . earlier as part of our training and this one just did not look right,” Morgan, 64, tells The Post.
“The one contrail that’s [supposed to go] on forever as it’s going into space was not one. It had split apart. The solid rocket boosters had come off early.”
As rescuers desperately searched for wreckage from the explosion, Morgan was certain that her friends were gone.
“We knew enough to know it sure wasn’t survivable,” she says.
Now, three decades after the disaster, footage of McAuliffe and Morgan will be shown as part of the National Geographic Channel special “Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes” (airing Monday at 9 p.m.), which weaves together NASA audio and video recordings and archival interviews with the flight crew.
The show details how Morgan and McAuliffe were selected from more than 10,000 applicants for the Teacher in Space program. The two each took a yearlong leave of absence from teaching to move to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for astronaut training and to design the lesson plans that McAuliffe would teach from space.
On launch day, Morgan wanted nothing more than to be with the crew she’d spent the last six months training with. When Challenger exploded 73 seconds into flight, the initial shock — and unsettling knowledge that it could have been her — gave way to survival mode.
“I went and grabbed my husband . . . and we went to crew quarters with the families to help out [making condolence calls to relatives],” Morgan says. “Inside it was lots of tears. On the outside it was, ‘We’ve got to make things better.’ ”
Another unexpected outcome of the accident: Morgan found herself the new Teacher in Space designee. NASA had scheduled speaking engagements for her and McAuliffe for when Challenger returned from space. Instead, Morgan carried on solo, until she returned to teaching in Idaho that fall.
On the tour, she discussed space exploration and astronaut training, but also shared stories about Mc-Auliffe, the other astronauts and their families in the wake of tragedy.
“I answered a whole bunch of people’s questions. They had a lot of . . . good ones,” Morgan recalls. “Sad ones, and even the sad ones are good ones.”
It would be more than 20 years — and another space disaster — before NASA fulfilled its promise of putting a teacher into space.
Morgan later selected to train as a mission specialist; her crew was to be the next mission after the doomed Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated on re-entry in 2003. Morgan finally flew on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2007. And despite seeing how horribly missions could go wrong — twice — she never wavered in her goal.
“I launched with a really happy heart,” she says. “You spend a lot of time training . . . and you trust the people around you to do the best that they can.”
Thirty years after Challenger, seeing the footage is still difficult for Morgan. While the image of the shuttle bursting into flames is etched into the national consciousness, she prefers to remember the day a different way — the crew all smiling on their way to the launchpad.