If things had been a little different, he could have been on the Space Shuttle Challenger

How this Maine teacher nearly went to space

Bill Townsend, pictured at his ham radio setup a few years ago at his home in Bar Harbor.

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 Joh…