Shuttle launch delayed to Wednesday

Elementary school teacher Barbara Morgan, of McCall, Idaho, will wait a day longer to blast into space with the crew of the space Shuttle Endeavour.

Late Friday afternoon, NASA delayed the scheduled liftoff 24 hours to give engineers more time to finish pre-flight work.

The shuttle launch target now is 6:36 p.m. Wednesday (3:36 p.m. Pacific) from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Lightning storms have prevented engineers from working on the launch pad. In addition, work to fix a leaky valve in Endeavour’s crew cabin took longer than expected, pushing back the start of the countdown to Sunday.

Led by Commander Scott Kelly, the flight crew of seven astronauts arrived Friday at Kennedy Space Center and will spend the next few days undergoing final pre-launch preparations including suit fit checks, briefings, medical exams and landing practice in the shuttle training aircraft.

The flight will be the first for Endeavour since 2002 and the 22nd flight to the International Space Station.

It’s also the first mission for Morgan, 55, whose association with NASA began more than 20 years ago. Morgan was the backup in 1986 for the nation’s first designated teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe. The two trained together for the mission. But the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, killing McAuliffe and the other crew members.

Morgan is designated an “educator-astronaut,” a fully trained mission specialist, rather than the original “teacher in space” designation.

She returned to her McCall classroom in 1986 and taught second and third grades at McCall-Donnelly Elementary School while continuing to work with NASA. In 1998, she was selected to become a mission specialist and reported to Johnson Space Center in Houston for full-time work and training.