Goldin announced that Glenn, a 76 year old politician and former Project Mercury astronaut, would fly as the last Payload Specialist for NASA on the STS-95 space shuttle mission now set for an autumn lift-off. But the NASA space chief also announced the death of the Civilians In Space program, a 1984 Reagan administration project to fly teachers and non astronaut researchers, scholars, and even journalists aboard the space shuttles. The last civilian to fly under the program was schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who died on Jan. 28, 1986 when the shuttle Challenger was destroyed in a launch explosion.

McAuliffe's back-up teacher-in-space, Barbara Morgan, will get her chance, after a decade's wait, to fly into orbit. But only under a new program announced Friday by which she will, in fact, become a U.S. astronaut and submit to the standard, extensive astronaut training program. Goldin said that Morgan would eventually fly as a Mission Specialist on a shuttle or space station mission. "She will do science on her flight," Goldin said. "This will be her primary duties, in addition to teaching." The new non-astronaut astronaut program would seek, in Goldin's words, to "find biologists and chemists and others with different and varied backgrounds" to become temporary astronauts. "There is no more civilians in space," he added. "We want people with graduate degrees, trained in science and technology, who have new ideas and reasons for their missions." The candidates selected under the new program would have to undergo the same extensive training that other astronauts have to experience. Earlier civilians like McAuliffe went through slightly more than a year's worth of training on average, and some, like former Utah Senator Jake Garn, who flew aboard Discovery on a 1985 spaceflight, trained for less than a year.

In essence, however, the new program is another effort to bring civilians aboard U.S. space vehicles that have not been part of the astronaut culture of test pilot training or science researchers, the same goal as the original 1984 project. A long time foe of such ideas, Goldin was defensive when asked by SpaceCast about his "conversion" from critic to supporter, especially in light of the Glenn decision. "I didn't change my view," Goldin said after the press conference. "I helped an American hero." And he also claimed that politics had no part in his approval of Glenn's second flight. "I felt it was the appropriate thing to do," Goldin snapped. "We cannot hide from risk. ..but this is not a signal that the shuttle is safe to fly civilians." It is, apparently, safe to fly politicians.

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