High Flying

It's not very often that I have one of those days where, at least for a brief moment, I wish I had done something different in my career.

Wednesday, was one of those days.

I interviewed Barry Wilmore Wednesday morning. Barry is from Mount Juliet and a graduate of UT. He is married and now lives in Houston, Texas.

And oh yeah, he's capable of piloting the Space Shuttle. Pretty cool, huh?

Barry was behind the controls when the Shuttle Atlantis blasted off on November 16, 2009 heading to the International Space Station. He also guided the Shuttle to a picture perfect landing 11 days later. "I wasn't afraid, we are well trained and I was ready. I knew my role during launch, we do multiple training events where we train for malfunction scenarios. It is a comforting feeling knowing that your trainers and the system NASA has, gets you ready to go and you feel comfortable with anything that might happen."

The astronaut says the four and a half million pound shuttle flies through space at 17,500 miles per hour. There are no speed traps and no red light cameras to worry about. Just one heck of a view of the world literally zipping by. "It was strange to look out the window and see Australia, then a couple of a minutes later you look out the window and there's Hawaii. An hour later you see China, then Japan is floating by underneath you. It's unreal."

He's ready, willing and able, but with the shuttle program being phased out by NASA, there are no space missions in Barry's future. And he's quite okay with that. "For me, flying in space is not the end all, be all. As a wordily experience, I don't know what could top it. But as far as the big scheme of things, and when I think about my eternal existence and the reason I'm here, to glorify my Lord, it is very insignificant."

Unless someone makes a huge mistake, I'll never sit in space ship and I'll never orbit the earth. But for a few minutes during my interview with an astronaut, I got about as close as possible. And in my world, that's pretty cool as well.