This story was originally published by The Other Maine, a biweekly newsletter written and edited by Emily Burnham.
In the early 1960s, Calais native Bill Townsend was in the Navy, stationed in the South Pacific. Among the many duties he and his fellow crewmen had were to stand by during the earliest Project Mercury space flights, when pioneer astronauts like Alan Shepard and John Glenn first shot into space and then landed in the ocean — sometimes in the Atlantic, sometimes in the Pacific.
From then on, Townsend was a devotee of all things spaceflight. Like so many others during the Space Age, he dreamed of someday going into space himself.
“I had that early contact with spaceflight, way back when it was still new,” Townshend, a longtime Bar Harbor resident, recalled during an interview. “It just stuck with me. I loved ‘Star Trek’ when it came around. I would try to contact the Space Shuttle when it first launched via ham radio.”
Around 25 years later, on Jan. 28, 1986, Townshend was sitting in his biology classroom at Sumner Memorial High School in Sullivan, when the school secretary knocked on his door. She told him the Space Shuttle Challenger, carrying seven crew members including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe — the first astronaut from the Teacher in Space program — had exploded at takeoff.
Townsend’s heart sank. He knew McAuliffe. If things had only been a little different, he’d have been the one on the Challenger instead.
Townsend was one of 114 teachers out of 11,000 applicants chosen by NASA as semifinalists for the Teacher in Space Project, first announced in 1984. He was one of two teachers from Maine in the program, alongside fellow Washington County native Gordon Corbett, who taught at Yarmouth Intermediate School. During the spring and summer of 1985, Townsend and his fellow candidates underwent a rigorous vetting and training program in Washington, D.C., and at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“They asked us a million questions, to figure out who we were and why we might be the right fit to go into space,” Townsend said. “We went to all kinds of workshops with other astronauts. It was a whirlwind. We learned so much. I think we were all just incredibly excited, the idea of actually going into space, experiencing weightlessness. We would see the Earth. It was a lot to take in, a lot to think about.”
Being New England neighbors, Townsend and McAuliffe quickly connected. They shared stories of teaching in rural schools, and sat together at a party for the candidates held at the White House, where then vice president and part-time Mainer George H.W. Bush entertained them.
“[McAuliffe] was very personable. She was a devoted teacher,” he said. “It was really an amazing group of people, all the teachers. I still maintain contact with a lot of them today.”
When the 10 finalists for the program were announced in July 1985, Townsend wasn’t on the list, but McAuliffe was, and she was eventually the one chosen to go into space. After she completed her 100 hours of spaceflight training, the Challenger was set to launch in November of that year, but it was delayed to January 22, 1986. For the Jan. 22 launch, NASA flew the other teacher candidates down to Florida to watch the launch from the Kennedy Space Center, including Townsend.
“We were all ready, but it was just too cold to launch that day,” Townsend recalled. “It was unusually cold for Florida that year. That was the problem the whole time.”
The launch was rescheduled for Jan. 28, but Townsend had to leave Florida and return to Maine due to his teaching schedule. The Challenger launch was televised nationwide, and schools across the country rolled TVs into classrooms in order to watch it — leaving a generation of kids traumatized as they watched the explosion happen live.
At rural Sumner High, Townsend said they couldn’t get the TV signal to come in. That’s why he found out about the explosion from the school secretary.
“I just had to tell myself that there was nowhere else Christa would have wanted to be,” he said. “The seals [on the shuttle] froze and broke. It was too cold. What made them decide to go for it? We’ll never know. I can’t dwell on it too much. I know it could have been me. It was a ‘careful what you wish for’ kind of situation. It was all just too awful to believe.”
Townsend was one of only two teacher astronaut candidates to be interviewed by media outlets in the wake of the tragedy. All of the candidates were still in Florida and had been whisked away by NASA in order to keep them from commenting, but Townsend was home in Maine. He fielded calls and made TV appearances for days after the disaster.
In the wake of the tragedy, the Teacher in Space Project was canceled, though NASA did eventually replace it with the Educator Astronaut Project, and the 33 Challenger Learning Centers across the country — including the one in Bangor — carry on its legacy.
Townsend taught high school science for another 11 years before retiring in 1997, and continued to stay adventurous, including collaborating on educational programming with Jackson Laboratory scientists and traveling to Antarctica with other science educators. For years after his NASA experience, he gave presentations to Maine schools, regaling them with stories from the intense training he went through.
“Kids always have a lot of questions. Sometimes it’s about science, and then sometimes it’s about how you use the bathroom in space,” Townsend said.
On a more earthly level, Townsend said the experience brought home the drastic differences between large, well-funded schools in heavily populated areas and tiny, rural schools like Sumner, with just a few hundred students and a close-to-the-bone budget.
“It was a revelation to me, how we are able to make do with so little, compared to these huge schools that can send teachers to conferences and conventions all over the country,” he said.
Townsend is very active during his retirement; for more than 20 years he’s led summertime nature tours around Mount Desert Island with Acadia Boat Tours. And every now and then, he attempts to contact the International Space Station from his home ham radio setup.
“I try to keep up with things. The technology progresses so rapidly. It’s incredible,” he said. “You don’t easily forget an experience like what we all had. Especially not one like the Challenger.”