This helped him enroll at Berkeley,[3][4] where Lind researched pion-nucleon scattering in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and earned a PhD in high-energy nuclear physics in 1964.

[5] Upon completing his undergraduate education, Lind enrolled at the United States Navy Officer Candidate School at Newport, Rhode Island.

[6] He received his Wings of Gold in 1955 at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi and served four years on active duty with the Navy at San Diego and aboard the carrier USS Hancock.

However, he and Group 5 colleague Bruce McCandless II (the salutatorian of his United States Naval Academy class and the recent recipient of a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University) were nonetheless treated as scientist-astronauts by NASA due to their academic training and lack of test pilot experience that Deke Slayton, Al Shepard and other NASA managers emphasized; among other factors, this would delay their progression in the flight rotation.

Schmitt, Lind and Owen Garriott were the only scientist-astronauts to receive advanced helicopter training, a key prerequisite for piloting the Apollo Lunar Module.

[8] Although he cross-trained with Lenoir and briefly proposed swapping positions with his crewmate, Lind elected to retain his original assignment due to the greater likelihood of the rescue mission (which could only accommodate the commander and pilot) amid the space program's dwindling flight opportunities.

[15] According to Michael Cassutt, in 1970, Lind "openly complained" to George Abbey (then technical assistant to Johnson Space Center director Robert R. Gilruth) about the perceived administrative machinations of Slayton and Shepard and Harrison Schmitt's assignment to Apollo 17.

[19] However, Abbey—a close friend of Schmitt who would eventually oversee Astronaut Corps assignments as director of flight operations from 1976 to 1988—took umbrage at Lind's cooperation with a 1969 report in The Washington Post that exposed rampant dissatisfaction among the scientist-astronauts.

He also alleged that Lind complained about "any and all subjects" related to the space program, associating him with a coterie of scientist-astronauts (including Story Musgrave) who perceived Abbey as a "faceless 'horse-holder' who had worked his way into a powerful job."

[19] When the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum received the unused Skylab B he "cried ceremonially in front of it", Lind later said; "I was ... in the right place at the wrong time".

[7] In a 1976 memo, Chris Kraft implicitly characterized Lind as one of NASA's nine active scientist-astronauts in the context of the payload specialist program.

[5] Lind finally flew as the lead mission specialist and de facto payload commander on STS-51-B (April 29 to May 6, 1985), logging over 168 hours in space.

Due to Apollo-era managerial preferences, his contentious relationship with George Abbey, NASA budgetary problems and delays in the Space Shuttle program, Lind waited longer than any other continuously serving American astronaut for a spaceflight: 19 years.

A space program aficionado has speculated that Lind's science-dominant assignment was a "reward... for sticking around so long," in contrast to the majority of early STS missions that were centered around routinized satellite deployments.

[1] STS-51-B was two decades after son David's stomach aches from fear of appearing on television like the families of other astronauts, such as neighbors James Irwin and Edgar Mitchell.