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The Relay That Lost Power and Turned the Clock Against Reentry · Space Exploration Stories

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  Speaker 1: 12,600 hours in the air. That number belongs to a
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  Speaker 1: man who once sat at the controls of a space
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  Speaker 1: shuttle 400 kilometers above the Earth, responsible for the lives
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: of everyone aboard. The same man, decades later, stood at
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: a whiteboard in Columbia, Missouri, explaining rocket propulsion to undergraduates
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  Speaker 1: who had never left the ground. That is not a fall.
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  Speaker 1: That is not a retreat. Understanding why requires going all
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  Speaker 1: the way back to a small city in central Illinois
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  Speaker 1: and following a thread that runs from a cornfield horizon
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  Speaker 1: to the edge of the atmosphere and back again. Most
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  Speaker 1: stories about astronauts end at the mission. Stephen Ray Nagel's
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  Speaker 1: story asks what a person does with 723 hours in
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  Speaker 1: space once they come home for good. Most stories about
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  Speaker 1: astronauts end at the mission. Stephen Ray Nagel's story, in
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  Speaker 1: a quiet way, asks a harder question. What does a
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  Speaker 1: person do with 723 hours in space once they come
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  Speaker 1: home for good? Canton, Illinois, sits in Fulton County in
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  Speaker 1: the western part of the state. In 1946, when Stephen
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  Speaker 1: Nagel was born there on October 27th, it was the
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  Speaker 1: kind of place where ambitions had to be built from
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  Speaker 1: scratch because the landscape offered no shortcuts. The sky above
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  Speaker 1: central Illinois is enormous, flat, and unobstructed. for a child
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  Speaker 1: who would spend his life learning to read that sky.
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  Speaker 1: It was an education before any school began. He graduated
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  Speaker 1: from Canton High School in 1964 and enrolled at the
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  Speaker 1: University of Illinois. His field was aeronautical and astronautical engineering.
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  Speaker 1: He finished in 1969 with high honors and received his
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  Speaker 1: commission through the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps on
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  Speaker 1: the same day he received his degree. Two things at once,
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  Speaker 1: that pattern would repeat. Undergraduate pilot training came next at
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  Speaker 1: Laredo Air Force Base in Texas. He completed it in
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  Speaker 1: February of 1970. What happened during that course is documented
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  Speaker 1: in a way that tells you something essential about Nagel
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  Speaker 1: before a single flight test. He did not win one award.
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  Speaker 1: He did not win two. He won four. The Commander's Trophy,
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  Speaker 1: the Flying Trophy, the Academic Trophy, and the Orville Wright
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  Speaker 1: Achievement Award from the Order of Daedalians. Four separate categories
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  Speaker 1: of excellence. One class, one man. That is not luck.
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  Speaker 1: That is a person who refuses partial answers. F-100 training
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  Speaker 1: followed at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. By October
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  Speaker 1: of 1970, he was flying F-10s operationally with the 68th
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  Speaker 1: Tactical Fighter Squadron at England Air Force Base in Louisiana. Then,
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  Speaker 1: in 1971, The record does something unusual. It sends him
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  Speaker 1: to Udon Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand for
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  Speaker 1: a full year, where he served as a T-28 instructor
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  Speaker 1: for the Laotian Air Force. The record names no sortie,
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  Speaker 1: no student, no airfield beyond Udon Royal Thai Air Force
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  Speaker 1: Base for those 12 months. The silence is complete. What
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  Speaker 1: it confirms is that he was there, teaching combat pilots
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  Speaker 1: in a region at war, and that he returned. He
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  Speaker 1: came back to England Air Force Base in October of
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  Speaker 1: 1972 as an instructor pilot and flight examiner on the A7D.
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  Speaker 1: In February of 1975, he was selected for the United
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  Speaker 1: States Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force
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  Speaker 1: Base in California. He completed the program in December of
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  Speaker 1: that same year and joined the 6005-12 Test Squadron in
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  Speaker 1: January of 1976 working on F-4 and A-7D flight test projects.
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  Speaker 1: In 1978, he earned his Master of Science in Mechanical
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  Speaker 1: Engineering from California State University, Fresno, and the Air Force
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  Speaker 1: awarded him the Meritorious Service Medal the same year. NASA
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  Speaker 1: selected him in August of 1979. He was 32 years
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  Speaker 1: old and had already lived three careers. What came next
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  Speaker 1: would take another six years. Four missions. and 723 hours
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  Speaker 1: beyond the atmosphere. But before any of that, he spent
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  Speaker 1: years in rooms most people never hear about, the Shuttle
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  Speaker 1: Avionics Integration Lab, the Flight Simulation Lab, ground support positions
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  Speaker 1: for the earliest shuttle flights. The man who would eventually
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  Speaker 1: command two orbiters first made sure the systems those orbiters
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  Speaker 1: depended on actually worked. The number that stops a listener
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  Speaker 1: cold is 170 hours. That is how long Steven Nagel
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  Speaker 1: spent in space during the summer of 1985, his first mission.
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  Speaker 1: Before the year was out, he would add 111 more.
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  Speaker 1: Two spaceflights. One calendar year. Most astronauts waited years between assignments.
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  Speaker 1: If a second mission came at all, the first launched
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  Speaker 1: on June 17, 1985. Discovery. Nagel flew as mission specialist
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  Speaker 1: on STS-51-G, and the crew's job description read like a
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  Speaker 1: dispatch from a new commercial age in orbit. They deployed
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  Speaker 1: three communications satellites, Morelos for Mexico, Arabsat for the Arab League,
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  Speaker 1: and Telstar for AT & T. Then they released a
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  Speaker 1: science platform called Spartan and let it drift free for
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  Speaker 1: 17 hours, collecting X-ray astronomy data on its own, before
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  Speaker 1: retrieving it. Six getaway special payloads ran experiments in the
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  Speaker 1: cargo bay. a strategic defense initiative laser tracking experiment. Part
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  Speaker 1: of the Reagan-era push toward missile defense was also activated
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  Speaker 1: on this flight. The shuttle had become a delivery truck,
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  Speaker 1: a laboratory, and a test range simultaneously. Nagel logged roughly
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  Speaker 1: 170 hours before Discovery touched down at Edwards on June 24th.
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  Speaker 1: That should have been the story for 1985. One flight.
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  Speaker 1: One recovery. Training. Weight. Instead, four months later, he was
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  Speaker 1: back on a pad. October 30th, 1985. Challenger, STS-61A. This
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  Speaker 1: mission carried something the space shuttle had never carried before,
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  Speaker 1: a payload controlled from outside the United States. The West
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  Speaker 1: German D-1 space lab module was managed from the German
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  Speaker 1: Space Operations Center in Oberpaffenhofen, Bavaria. Mission controllers in a
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  Speaker 1: foreign country were directing experiments running inside an American orbiter.
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  Speaker 1: It was the first time that had ever happened. Magel
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  Speaker 1: flew as pilot. The crew of eight was the largest
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  Speaker 1: ever launched on a single spacecraft at that point. They
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  Speaker 1: completed 111 orbits over just under eight days, running more
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  Speaker 1: than 75 experiments in physiology, material science, biology, and navigation.
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  Speaker 1: The science was dense and the pace relentless. Challenger landed
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  Speaker 1: at Edwards on November 6th. Nagel had now spent 281
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  Speaker 1: hours in space inside a single calendar year. He was
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  Speaker 1: 38 years old. There is a detail in the structure
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  Speaker 1: of those two missions that is easy to read past.
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  Speaker 1: On the first, STS-51-G, he was a mission specialist, responsible
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  Speaker 1: for payloads and operations, not the vehicle itself. On the second, STS-61-A,
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  Speaker 1: He was pilot, second in command of the orbiter, hands
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  Speaker 1: on the controls. The progression was not accidental. NASA was
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  Speaker 1: watching what he could do with responsibility, then giving him
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  Speaker 1: more of it. What came next required six more years
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  Speaker 1: of patience. The shuttle fleet went silent after January 28th, 1986.
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  Speaker 1: Challenger broke apart, 73 seconds after launch, and with it
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  Speaker 1: went seven crew members and the entire cadence of the program,
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  Speaker 1: the Investigations. the redesigns, the recertification. All of it consumed
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  Speaker 1: two years and eight months. Noggle had flown twice in 1985.
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  Speaker 1: He would not fly again until 1991. During that gap,
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  Speaker 1: he served as the astronaut office representative for crew escape
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  Speaker 1: system development. The work was specific. Figure out how astronauts
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  Speaker 1: could survive a scenario the program had just proven could
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  Speaker 1: kill everyone. He was not designing propulsion or navigation. He
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  Speaker 1: was designing the last option, the thing you reach for
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  Speaker 1: when everything else has already failed. In 1991, he was
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  Speaker 1: named Acting Chief of the Astronaut Office. Then, on April
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  Speaker 1: 5th of that year, Atlantis launched, carrying STS-37, and Nagel
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  Speaker 1: was in the left seat. His first command, the primary objective,
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  Speaker 1: was the deployment of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, one
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  Speaker 1: of NASA's four great observatories and the heaviest astrophysical payload ever.
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  Speaker 1: ever launched by the shuttle at that point. Compton would
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  Speaker 1: spend the next nine years mapping gamma-ray sources across the sky.
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  Speaker 1: Getting it into orbit was Nagel's job. The deployment went
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  Speaker 1: as planned. But then the mission produced something no one
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  Speaker 1: had written into the flight plan. One of the observatory's
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  Speaker 1: antennas failed to deploy. It was stuck. The Compton gamma-ray
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  Speaker 1: observatory was in orbit, but without that antenna, it could
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  Speaker 1: not receive commands from the ground. Nine years of science.
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  Speaker 1: billions of dollars of hardware, the heaviest payload the shuttle
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  Speaker 1: had ever lifted, and it was locked. The crew had
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  Speaker 1: not trained for this. There was no procedure. The flight
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  Speaker 1: plan had no entry for it. What Nagel and his
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  Speaker 1: crew did next had never been successfully done before in
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  Speaker 1: the history of the shuttle program. Jerry Ross and Jay
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  Speaker 1: Apt suited up. There was no procedure to hand them.
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  Speaker 1: No checklist existed for what they were about to attempt.
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  Speaker 1: The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory's high gain antenna had failed
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  Speaker 1: to extend on its own, and without it, the telescope
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  Speaker 1: could not receive commands from Earth. The crew had two spacesuits,
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  Speaker 1: two pairs of hands, and a piece of hardware no
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  Speaker 1: one had ever touched outside of a clean room. Ross
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  Speaker 1: and Abt exited the airlock. This was the first scheduled
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  Speaker 1: spacewalk in five and a half years. The shuttle program
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  Speaker 1: had not planned an EVA since before Challenger. The suits,
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  Speaker 1: the protocols, the muscle memory, all of it had been dormant.
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  Speaker 1: They reached the antenna. They pushed it by hand. It moved.
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  Speaker 1: The antenna locked into position. Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was alive.
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  Speaker 1: Back inside the orbiter, Nagel brought his crew home. Atlantis
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  Speaker 1: landed at Edwards Air Force Base on April 11, 1991.
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  Speaker 1: Six days, the heaviest payload ever deployed by the shuttle
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  Speaker 1: was now operational in orbit, and it had taken an unscheduled,
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  Speaker 1: unscripted act of physical problem-solving to save it. In the
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  Speaker 1: history of the shuttle program, no unscheduled EVs, had ever
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  Speaker 1: succeeded at its objective before that moment. The record called
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  Speaker 1: it the first successful unscheduled EV for that purpose. The
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  Speaker 1: American Astronautical Society agreed. The STS-37 crew received the AAS
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  Speaker 1: Flight Achievement Award. Nagel had one more mission ahead of him.
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  Speaker 1: Columbia's engines lit on April 26, 1993. STS-55 carried the
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  Speaker 1: German D-2 space lab. 89 experiments in material science, life sciences, robotics, astronomy,
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  Speaker 1: and Earth observation. It was the second collaboration between NASA
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  Speaker 1: and the German Space Agency on this scale, and Nagel
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  Speaker 1: sat in the commander's seat again. Ten days later, on
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  Speaker 1: May 6th, Columbia touched down at Edwards. That landing closed
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  Speaker 1: a specific accounting. Across four missions, Discovery in June of 1985,
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  Speaker 1: Challenger in October of 1985. Challenger in October of 1985.
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  Speaker 1: Atlantis in April of 1991. Columbia in April of 1993.
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  Speaker 1: Steven Nagel had accumulated 723 hours in space, 12,600 total
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  Speaker 1: flight hours across an entire career. He retired from the
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  Speaker 1: United States Air Force on February 28th, 1995. He retired
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  Speaker 1: from the NASA astronaut office On March 1st, 1995. One day. Apart.
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  Speaker 1: It was the kind of precision you would expect from
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  Speaker 1: a man who once swept all four awards in a
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  Speaker 1: single pilot training class. Nothing left undone on either side.
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  Speaker 1: Both doors closed cleanly. He moved through a post-astronaut career
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  Speaker 1: that fit the same pattern. Deputy Director for Operations Development
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  Speaker 1: in the Safety and Quality Assurance Office at Johnson Space Center.
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  Speaker 1: then back to flying as a research pilot in the
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  Speaker 1: Aircraft Operations Division. The work stayed close to the machines.
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  Speaker 1: It always had. In 2011, Nagel and his wife Linda
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  Speaker 1: Godwin packed up and left Houston. Godwin, herself a NASA
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  Speaker 1: astronaut with four missions of her own, had accepted a
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  Speaker 1: position in the physics department at the University of Missouri
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  Speaker 1: in Columbia. She would teach astronomy. Nagel joined the College
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  Speaker 1: of Engineering. in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
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  Speaker 1: He became a retention specialist and an instructor in aerospace propulsion.
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  Speaker 1: Think about what that means for a moment. The man
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  Speaker 1: who commanded two shuttle missions, who oversaw the deployment of
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  Speaker 1: the heaviest astrophysical payload in shuttle history, who spent months
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  Speaker 1: designing escape systems for astronauts after Challenger. That man was
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  Speaker 1: now sitting across a desk from first-year engineering students. walking
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  Speaker 1: them through how a rocket engine produces thrust. The man
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  Speaker 1: who oversaw the deployment of the heaviest astrophysical payload in
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  Speaker 1: shuttle history was now walking first-year engineering students through how
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  Speaker 1: a rocket engine produces thrust. It is not a diminishment.
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  Speaker 1: The record gives no indication. Nagel experienced it as one.
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  Speaker 1: Sport flying, amateur radio, music, the hobbies of a man
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  Speaker 1: who had not stopped being curious, who had not exchanged
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  Speaker 1: motion for stillness. He just brought the motion closer to
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  Speaker 1: the ground. On August 21st, 2014, Stephen Ray Noggle died
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  Speaker 1: in Columbia, Missouri. He was 67 years old. The cause
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  Speaker 1: was advanced, melanoma. There is no unresolved question here. No investigation,
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  Speaker 1: no controversy, no open file. The record is complete. A
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  Speaker 1: man was born in Canton, Illinois in 1946. learned to
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  Speaker 1: fly over Texas, spent a year in Southeast Asia instructing
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  Speaker 1: Laotian pilots in aircraft that had no business being in
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  Speaker 1: that airspace, came home, went to Edwards, went to Houston,
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  Speaker 1: went to orbit four times, and then went to Missouri
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  Speaker 1: to teach. The number at the start of this story, 12,600 hours,
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  Speaker 1: belongs to him entirely. But there is something specific about
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  Speaker 1: how he spent those last years that keeps pulling at
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  Speaker 1: the narrative. The classroom at the University of Missouri was
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  Speaker 1: not a consolation prize. It was a deliberate choice, made
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  Speaker 1: by a man who had already done everything the record celebrates.
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  Speaker 1: 723 hours in space, two shuttle commands, an unscheduled spacewalk
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  Speaker 1: that saved a nine-year science mission. With bare hands, he
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  Speaker 1: could have stopped there. He didn't. Linda Godwin taught stars
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  Speaker 1: in the physics building. Nagel taught propulsion two buildings over.
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  Speaker 1: Two astronauts, one small Midwestern city. Both of them explaining
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  Speaker 1: the universe to people who had never left the atmosphere.
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  Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where that detail
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  Speaker 1: is ironic. The cosmos condensed to a lecture hall, but
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  Speaker 1: the record pushes back against that reading. Nagel won the
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  Speaker 1: commander's trophy, the flying trophy and the academic trophy in
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  Speaker 1: the same pilot training class. He was always, at some level,
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  Speaker 1: also a teacher. The classroom at Missouri was not a departure.
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  Speaker 1: It was a return. He had been building toward it
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  Speaker 1: since Laredo Air Force Base in 1969, when a young
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  Speaker 1: man from Canton, Illinois discovered he was good at three
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  Speaker 1: things simultaneously, leading, flying, and explaining why both worked. The
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  Speaker 1: long arc of his career shows a through line, mastery
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  Speaker 1: paired with translation. He learned complicated systems in test programs
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  Speaker 1: and labs so that he could operate them. He learned
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  Speaker 1: to operate them so he could lead crews, He learned
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  Speaker 1: to lead crews so he could describe and safeguard their work.
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  Speaker 1: And in the end, he taught the next generation how
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  Speaker 1: that machinery translates into motion and how motion becomes knowledge.
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  Speaker 1: That cumulative expertise, hours in cockpit and hours at the whiteboard,
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  Speaker 1: mapped onto a life that treated each transition as a
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  Speaker 1: technical problem to be solved cleanly and respectfully. There are
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  Speaker 1: small human contours to add that fit the record without
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: inventing Students later recalled a faculty member who could pause
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  Speaker 1: mid-derivation to sketch a flight profile and then, with the
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: same clarity, recount a hand push on an antenna in orbit.
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  Speaker 1: Colleagues noted his patience. He could slow the physics until
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: undergraduates caught up without losing the thread that connected an
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  Speaker 1: equation to a real engine's rumble. Those recollections do not
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  Speaker 1: alter the facts of the missions. They extend their consequences.
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  Speaker 1: The knowledge of a thousand flights folded down into lecture notes.
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  Speaker 1: Office hours and advising sessions for students who would not
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  Speaker 1: necessarily become astronauts, but who might, one day, design the
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  Speaker 1: systems that make flight possible. The record shows a sequence.
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  Speaker 1: Talent confirmed through award skills honed in test programs. Responsibilities
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  Speaker 1: accepted in orbit. Problems solved without a script. And then
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  Speaker 1: a choice to teach. That choice reframes the earlier feats.
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  Speaker 1: The unscheduled Evie. that saved Compton was not an isolated
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  Speaker 1: act of improvisation. It was the culmination of training, steady leadership,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: and the refusal to accept unresolved risk. Teaching propulsion is
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  Speaker 1: not a retreat from adventure. It is a way of
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  Speaker 1: ensuring the next crew does not face the same unknowns unprepared. 12,600 hours.
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  Speaker 1: At the end, they resolved into a single room, a
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  Speaker 1: single question written on a whiteboard, and students who did
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  Speaker 1: not yet know they were being talked by someone who
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  Speaker 1: had already answered it, at 450 kilometers above the Earth,
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  Speaker 1: with a stuck antenna and no procedure in the flight plan,
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  Speaker 1: trusting two crewmates to fix by hand what the machinery
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  Speaker 1: could not. That number meant something different at the beginning
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  Speaker 1: of this story. Now you know what it cost to
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  Speaker 1: build it. This show is made by Obo Media.