Leland Melvin is the only person drafted into the National Football League who later flew in space. His path took him from college football to aerospace engineering, then through an astronaut medical setback that nearly ended his space career before it began.

Melvin graduated from the University of Richmond with a chemistry degree in 1986 and was selected by the Detroit Lions in the 11th round of that year’s NFL Draft. A hamstring injury ended his run with Detroit, and another injury during a later opportunity with the Dallas Cowboys closed the door on professional football.

He rebuilt around science. Melvin earned a master’s degree in materials science engineering from the University of Virginia and joined NASA Langley Research Center in 1989. His engineering work included fiber-optic sensors designed to measure strain, temperature and damage in aerospace structures. NASA records his transition from NFL draft pick to engineer and astronaut.

I remember giving a talk and only the boys raised their hands and wanted to be Astronauts. I asked the girls why and they said that I said it was the Manned Space Program. That day my language changed and it became the Human Space Program. Language and #RepresentationMatters TY🚀

— Leland Melvin (@Astro_Flow) August 21, 2018

NASA selected Melvin for astronaut training in 1998. Then came another apparent career-ending moment. During underwater spacewalk training, he suddenly lost his hearing and was medically disqualified from flight. Emergency surgery restored only part of it.

He still made it to orbit. Melvin flew aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis on STS-122 in 2008 and STS-129 in 2009, helping assemble the International Space Station and logging more than 565 hours in space. TED’s biography notes that he remains the only NFL draftee known to have flown in space.

After flying, Melvin became NASA’s associate administrator for education and helped lead national STEM-education work. His résumé now reads less like a single profession than a sequence of complete careers: athlete, engineer, astronaut and education leader.

His story follows another unusual career path recently profiled by BitcoinVersus.Tech: Jonny Kim’s move from Navy SEAL to doctor to astronaut. BitcoinVersus.Tech has also covered astronaut crews returning from long ISS missions and NASA’s search for the commercial stations expected to follow the ISS.

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