Michel was born June 5, 1934, to parents to Frank and Viola Michel. He was married to Bonnie Hausman, a web technical specialist. He had two children, Alice and Jeff by his wife Beverly who predeceased him, and three grandchildren. His hobbies were photography, tennis, handball, and baseball. Michel died at the age of 80 on February 26, 2015. He was buried with full military honors at the Houston National Cemetery.
Michel was a junior engineer with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company’s guided missile division before joining the Air Force in 1955. As an AFROTC graduate, he received flight training at Marana Air Force Base, Arizona, and at Laredo Air Force Base and Perrin Air Force Base in Texas. During his three years of military service, Michel flew F-86D interceptors in the United States and in Europe. Michel accumulated 1,000 hours flying time with 900 hours in jet aircraft. Following his tour of active duty in the Air Force, Michel was a graduate student and research fellow at the California Institute of Technology, doing experimental and theoretical work in nuclear physics for Lauritsen and Richard P. Feynman, along with work in theoretical astrophysics for Fowler. He joined the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas in July 1963. Michel's efforts there were directed at researching and teaching space sciences, such as the interaction of solar winds and the lunar atmosphere. Michel was selected as a scientist-astronaut in NASA Astronaut Group 4 in June 1965. He resigned from NASA in August 1969 without having being assigned to any spaceflight missions. Michel decided to resign after it became clear that he would not be given a flight assignment, due to the scientific community's demands that his fellow astronaut, the professional geologist Harrison Schmitt, be reassigned to Michel's position on Apollo 17 after Schmitt's planned mission on Apollo 18 was cancelled. After his resignation from NASA, Michel returned to teaching and research at Rice, where he also served as chair of the space physics and astronomy department from 1974 to 1979. He was the Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor of Astrophysics from 1974 until his retirement in 2000. Michel was named a Guggenheim Fellow to the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, from 1979 to 1980, and was awarded a Humboldt Prize to study in Heidelberg at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, from 1983 to 1984. Following his retirement, Michel spent the 2001–2002 academic year in Japan at the Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory of the University of Nagoya as a visiting professor.
Research
Michel's research spanned many disciplines. In 1964, he predicted the existence of spin “optical rotation” due to parity nonconserving weak interactions. This phenomenon was experimentally confirmed in 1980 and is used to study parity nonconserving weak interactions between neutrons and nuclei. Michel is best known for his work on pulsars and neutron star magnetospheres but his work also included solar wind interactions with the Moon and other bodies, extending to the heliopause. In 2000, Michel officially retired from Rice but he continued to be active in research until his death in 2015.
