Bill Nelson: The Challenger Seat Swap, Three Senate Terms, and NASA

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Bill Nelson was born in Miami in 1942, lost his father to a heart attack at 14 and his mother to ALS at 24, transferred to Yale, earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1968, and reached the rank of captain in the U.S. Army Reserve during the Vietnam War. Elected to the Florida House in 1972 from Brevard County on the Space Coast, he moved to the U.S. House in 1978 and chaired the House Space Subcommittee. In January 1986 he spent six days in orbit aboard Columbia as a payload specialist, the second sitting member of Congress and the first House member to fly on the shuttle, in a seat originally slated for Gregory Jarvis. Ten days after Nelson returned, Jarvis died when Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch.

Nelson's 1990 run for governor collapsed after he attacked Lawton Chiles over his age and his use of Prozac, and he finished with 30.5 percent in the primary. He rebuilt as Florida treasurer, insurance commissioner and fire marshal from 1995 to 2000, then won a U.S. Senate seat in 2000 and held it until 2019, backing the Affordable Care Act and same sex marriage while voting to cut the estate tax and for the Iraq war resolution. He lost to Rick Scott in 2018 by roughly 10,000 votes, a race an MIT study linked to a Broward County ballot layout that caused thousands of undervotes. In 2021 Joe Biden named him NASA administrator, and the Senate confirmed him unanimously; he served until January 2025.

• He wrote a book about his shuttle flight in 1988, cementing his reputation as Congress's space politician.
• In 2006 he met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus over the objections of the White House and State Department, citing the Iraq Study Group.
• During the 2018 campaign he said Russian operatives had penetrated some Florida election systems, a claim later intelligence reports supported.
• At NASA he oversaw the James Webb Space Telescope, the uncrewed Artemis I mission and the DART asteroid test, and embraced fixed price contracts he had once resisted.
• In a 2024 congressional hearing he mistakenly said the far side of the Moon is always in the dark.