Former Vancouver teacher on next Shuttle flight

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By TOM VOGT The Columbian

Summary

Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger already has taken one trip with the space shuttle Discovery, moving along at something like 1 mph. Her next trip will be a lot quicker.

Story Published: Mar 10, 2010 at 1:50 PM PDT

Story Updated: Mar 10, 2010 at 2:39 PM PDT

Former Vancouver teacher on next Shuttle flight

Dorothy M. Metcalf-Lindenburger

VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) - Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger already has taken one trip with the space shuttle Discovery, moving along at something like 1 mph.

Her next trip will be a lot quicker, at a velocity the former Hudson's Bay High School teacher has heard described as "a kick in the pants."

That will happen on April 5 - if everything goes according to schedule - when Metcalf-Lindenburger makes her first trip into orbit. She is a member of the crew of STS-131, which is headed for the International Space Station.

The seven astronauts took a brief break from training Tuesday afternoon for a press conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and Metcalf-Lindenburger described her role as a mission specialist. She will operate a robotic arm during her 13 days in space, the former Vancouver resident said.

She explained that launch preparations haven't tapered off yet.

"Every time we're in a simulator, the idea is to throw a whole bunch of failures at us and see how we handle them," Metcalf-Lindenburger said by phone from Houston. "Do we continue or do we return, and the ultimate goal is crew safety.

"Today, we were thinking the engines are going to light," she said, describing the Tuesday morning training session. "They tricked us and failed all of them before we even launched. You don't see that often. Any time in the simulator, you're really being challenged."

But that's something Metcalf-Lindenburger has faced ever since she left Hudson's Bay High School to enter astronaut training in 2004.

"I was in Vancouver, focused on teaching high school and coaching, and suddenly I'm flying a T-38 jet," said Metcalf-Lindenburger, who taught science and astronomy and coached cross-country at Bay. "I'm going through different land survival and water survival courses.

"It was beyond what I'd been doing," she said. Still, "I realized my science career served me very well. Math and science have a common language. You need to learn the jargon from an aeronautical perspective. You're still using the laws of gravity, you're just calling things by different terms.

"It probably was a bigger learning curve for me" than for people who came in with an aerospace background, she said. "I was drinking from a fire hose at the beginning."

There is a personal side to launch preparations, too.

"We're coming together as a team. Three of us were classmates in the Class of 2004," she said. "It's nice to know each other on a personal level."

Metcalf-Lindenburger said she enjoyed a training stint at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida a few days ago. One highlight was watching NASA's massive vehicle known as a crawler move the space shuttle from the assembly building to its launch pad last week a journey of 3.4 miles.

"It was incredible," she said. "It was midnight, coming out of the huge vehicle assembly building that's over 500 feet tall. It was emotional."

The crew had a chance to ride on the massive crawler for a while, "Although it was only doing 1 mph," she said.

Now Metcalf-Lindenburger is looking forward to seeing what the Discovery can do with the pedal to the metal.

"Liftoff, I hear, is a kick in the pants," Metcalf-Lindenburger said. She's also looking forward to the zero gravity environment in orbit, where she can try out some back-flip tricks she's learned.

"And I'm looking forward to the view - both the heavens above and back down at Earth," the former astronomy teacher said.