Former 'Teacher In Space' Candidate Was Up For Challenger

Paul Stengel, who was a New York State finalist in the first year of NASA’s Teacher In Space Program, will speak at the Custer Institute in Southold on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Stengel was teaching his physics class at Shoreham-Wading River High School in April, 1985 when the superintendent came in the room and asked him to step out into the hall.

“He told me he’d gotten the call from the state education department; I’d been chosen as a state finalist for Teacher in Space,” said Stengel.

The previous summer President Ronald Reagan had announced the Teacher In Space Program. Stengel had applied for it the following January.

He had long held a fascination for “the final frontier.” Stengel related being “awed” at a Daily News headline while on a camping trip at Wildwood State Park in 1955, “About how the U.S. was planning to launch an artificial satellite into orbit.”

Being chosen as a Teacher in Space finalist was “a childhood fantasy gotten real," he said.

The five state finalists would be narrowed to two. Out of one hundred national finalists would be chosen the first citizen astronaut.

Ultimately, Stengel was not chosen to go into space. The finalist who did that year was a teacher from Concord, N.H. — Christa McAuliffe, whom Stengel met some months before her tragic death in the Challenger explosion, January 1986.

Stengel described watching that event in a packed classroom of students. “We had three TVs on—with ABC, CBS, NBC. I was giving the kids a run-through of the launch program. As soon as I saw the explosion I knew. It was minutes into the flight. It took the students a little while to understand the smoke they saw coming from the Space Shuttle was not part of the normal liftoff.”

Did Stengel reflect that he might have been in the Challenger had he been chosen instead of McAuliffe?

He said, “I don’t recall dwelling on it. But my friends said, ‘If it had been up to you, you would have been on that rocket.’ My answer was, if I did go that way, so be it. I would have been fulfilling a childhood dream. It’s all part of the journey.”

Stengel remained deeply interested in the space program. He’s been at three Shuttle launches and would have “Shuttle breakfasts” in his classroom on launch days.

He laments NASA’s present course, which leaves the U.S. as needing to hitch rides with the Russians to the International Space Station. The Constellation program, intended to bring us back to the moon and, from there, go to Mars, has been cancelled.

The manned space program has averaged $8.3 billion per year (2010 dollars). Americans spend a lot more on other things, such as $90 billion a year on alcohol. Stengel asserts that spending on space will help on Earth.

“The country is fixated on the economy right now. But history shows that when technology is spurred you get a huge economic return. For every dollar you invest in aerospace you get eight.”