A "sixth-generation military brat," Deal was born at an Air Force base in Alabama but moved before he acquired any memories of the place; it would be the first of many moves during his childhood. His father helped pioneer the military use of computers in the 1950s and 1960s and later worked for several years on the Apollo program, managing NASA's computer center in Slidell, La., where Deal went to high school.

Deal's parents took him to air shows throughout his childhood, and he remembers watching live coverage of early Mercury space shots. In 1969, shortly before entering college, he stood on the Banana River causeway near Cape Canaveral, in Florida, to watch the launch of Apollo 11 on its way to the first manned moon landing. He decided that his life would follow that rocket—he wanted to go as high and as fast and as far as possible.

Now 51, Deal started off studying electrical engineering at Mississippi State University, in Starkville, but then shifted to aeronautical engineering as he got more deeply involved in designing and flying prize-winning model airplanes. With enough credits for an engineering degree, in his junior year he broadened his technical background by switching his major to physics. "I recall the effect a couple of professors had," he explains. "They were passionate and excited about physics, astronomy, and thermodynamics," and that infected him, too.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1965 and while finishing college in the Air Force's Reserve Officer's Training Corps, he decided to broaden his education still more by completing a master's degree in counseling and psychology. This unusual choice would later pay off immensely when Deal started working on accident investigations.

"I've taken part in about a dozen major rocket and aviation accident investigation boards," says Deal. It started when he served as a witness for an aircraft accident investigation board and later became a quality assurance officer for three jet systems. "I got tagged as someone who could dig to the root causes of aircraft crashes," he says. By far the most challenging was his role on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, impaneled immediately after the space shuttle disaster in February 2003. "I did a major portion of the interviews of the engineers and managers," he says, "and my counseling degree enabled me to get out of people things they didn't even realize they knew about the accident—and its causes."