BY KAREN BOSSICK

The trip into outer space for 120 adults and students at Ketchum’s Community Library began with an illustration of just how long it takes for the space shuttle to accelerate to 17,500 miles per hour.

“It takes five miles,” said former Astronaut Barbara Morgan, noting that it was about the distance between Ketchum and East Fork Road. “When I say, ‘Stop,’ we’ll be there.”

Those taking part in the Alturas Institute’s two-day Conversations with Exceptional Women leaned in, trying to anticipate just how many minutes that might take.

“Go,” said Morgan. And then, immediately, “Stop.”

That’s maybe a second, if you were keeping track.

Morgan was a teacher at McCall-Donnelly Elementary School in Idaho when she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in NASA’s Teacher in Space program. And this week she used the same creativity she had once used with students to tap into the curiosity of those attending the conference as she took them with her on her journey to the International Space Station.

“I’m always asked if I was scared when I took my trip into space,” said Morgan, whose partner in the Teacher in Space program Christa McAuliffe died when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after lift-off in 1986. “I wasn’t scared. We had trained for years and years and we had weighed the risks long before. But I can say I was very alert on the launch pad.”

Morgan, who now lives in Boise where she and her husband Clay have worked with Boise State University, spent a couple hours lying on her back in the 90-degree, 90 percent humidity of Florida as she awaited the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour in 2007. Thankfully, she said, cooling systems in her astronaut suit kept her comfortable as she listened to the shuttle creak and groan.

The shuttle was going a mere hundred miles an hour as it cleared the tower, propelled by 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Some astronauts say lift-off feels like a two-ton gorilla jumping up and down on their chests, she said.

“I felt an enormous push on my back. Immediately, I thought, ‘Wow! We’re finally on our way to the International Space Station where our mission was to build the station.’ ”

As the shuttle settled into a steady 17,500 miles per hour, there was no sense of motion, Morgan said.

“It was only when we looked out the window that we could see how quickly we were traveling.”

Morgan tried to keep her head towards the ceiling to keep from getting nauseous. After a couple days, her body got used to her new topsy-turvy reality and “up” became whichever way she was  facing.

“I love living and working in space—it’s like flying in your dreams. Or, swimming when you’re really relaxed in the pool, only without the water against your body,” she said.

Morgan was so busy performing the tasks assigned to her as a mission specialist that she didn’t look out the window at first. When she did, she was mesmerized by thunderstorms which she came to believe were not isolated thunderstorms but huge systems. Also, solar rays, which resembled golden sails that got red and redder as if she was looking into a toaster.

“I loved the views, the perspectives I got. I was so surprised to see the coast of East Africa totally lit up.”

She and her fellow astronauts explored their new environment by playing with their food.

Morgan showed a video of fellow astronauts tossing M&Ms into a ball of water and getting it to spin like a top. They caught the candy with their mouths as it floated around the cabin. And they caught pieces using a tortilla as if it was a catcher’s mitt.

When they had dispensed with the M&Ms, they put themselves in the bubble by positioning themselves just behind it.

Three days after launch the shuttle reached the 400-ton International Space Shuttle, which was taken into space piece by piece beginning in 1998.

“It’s enormous. If I were to bring it back to earth and put it on BSU’s blue turf, it would spill out over the sides of the football field.”

The station serves as a microgravity research laboratory in which astronauts conduct experiments in human biology and other fields.

“It’s an engineering marvel,” Morgan said, noting that astronauts from 16 countries overcame their different languages and ways of negotiating to build it.

The station experiences 16 sunrises and sunsets a day, or 45 minutes of daylight and 45 minutes of nighttime continuously. So it goes by three kinds of time, including Houston’s and its own “mission time.”

Frustrated that there was no scheduled time to look out the windows at the world rushing by, Morgan volunteered to put the shades down when it was time to go to sleep so she could indulge in some extra peeks.

“The blackness of space is a blackness you never see on Earth. It’s like a flat black paint but you can see through it forever. And it seems to have a smooth velvety texture, like creamy black coffee but not even like creamy black coffee,” Morgan said, grasping for words to describe her experience ten years later.

“The Milky Way looks like someone splattered paint until it practically solid white. The ocean is so huge  one of my colleagues said, ‘I don’t know why they call it Earth. They ought to call it ocean.’ As for Planet Earth, it was just another spaceship going by.”

And what of the millions of basil seeds she took into space?

The seeds had to be triple bagged so they wouldn’t leak and spill all over the station. And, while Morgan notes that she’s never smelled basil seed, the smell of basil permeating the space station had everyone salivating for lasagna.

Morgan brought those seeds home, along with three million other seeds that had planted in a suitcase-sized space garden to see how they grow in zero gravity. They were dispensed among Earthlings in 40,000 classrooms across the globe, including one in the Wood River Valley, so students could test how fast space basil grows compared to Earth basil.

The idea: To plant a seed that would get students thinking about their own futures in space.

Morgan’s mission was fraught with peril early on after scientists determined a piece of foam had fallen off the shuttle, leaving a baseball-sized hole.

“That was a really big deal for our families,” said Morgan noting that something similar had caused the space shuttle Columbia to disintegrate during re-entry four years earlier.

“We knew it was a big deal but we knew we had a job to do. And we knew that our engineers had worked on different repair techniques, although none had been tested.”

Endeavor was ordered back a day early because of Hurricane Dean. Reluctantly, the Americans shared a last supper of Russian caviar and pate on American tortillas. Then they flew right over the eye of the hurricane.

As they did, Morgan looked down at the ocean and thought how hard it had been for early explorers to cross it. Then she thought of how smooth their trip had been over that same ocean.

“That’s when I really understood space exploration is a very natural thing for humans to be doing.”