Endeavour returned to flight in August 2007 after major overhaul, delivering a truss segment and supplies to the International Space Station. The mission drew special attention for a member of its crew of seven: Barbara Morgan, who had trained decades earlier as backup to Christa McAuliffe and now flew as an educator astronaut, quietly completing a journey the Challenger accident had interrupted.
The crew installed the short truss segment and used a new system to draw power from the station, letting the Shuttle extend its stay. A gouge in the orbiter's heat shield from ascent debris prompted careful analysis before it was cleared as safe. Morgan spoke with students from orbit, fulfilling the teaching-from-space promise of the mission that had ended in tragedy — a poignant thread connecting the programme's darkest day to its recovery.
Barbara Morgan finally flew. She had been selected in 1985 as the backup to Christa McAuliffe in the Teacher in Space programme, had watched Challenger break apart from the viewing stands, and had spent the following years teaching in Idaho while the programme that had chosen her was dismantled and rebuilt. NASA hired her as a full astronaut in 1998, and she reached orbit in August 2007, twenty-two years after being selected.
She flew as a mission specialist rather than a passenger, operating the robotic arm during the installation of a truss segment and speaking to schoolchildren from orbit — completing, in a roundabout and much harder way, the assignment McAuliffe had been given.
The flight also faced the question that had destroyed Columbia. A piece of foam gouged a hole through tiles on Endeavour's belly, and for several days engineers modelled, tested and argued about whether to attempt a repair. The analysis concluded the damage would not burn through to the structure, the crew flew home without fixing it, and the decision was correct — but it was made with data and imagery that did not exist in 2003.
