CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) –
Only one person on the planet has covered every manned launch out of Cape Canaveral and now, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of spaceflight, he's written a
book about it.
Veteran NBC
space correspondent Jay Barbree's memoir, "Live from Cape Canaveral," is being released over the Labor
Day weekend by Smithsonian Books.
"There are an awful lot of
guys ... who were here for the early days and they're no longer here," Barbree,
73, said recently at the Kennedy Space Center, squeezing in an interview before
hurrying off to cover a NASA news conference.
"So I just got to thinking,
no one really knows their stories. No one really knows what THE, and I
underscore THE astronauts were like, and when I say THE astronauts, I mean the
seven original Mercury, and the pranks and the fun times that they all went
through.
"Today, it's pretty much
all computers. But in those days, they went out, kicked the tires, flew it,
checked it out themselves. So I thought, well, if that story is going to be
told, I've got to do it."
His book opens, naturally
enough, with the beginning of the Space Age on Oct. 4, 1957 – the Soviet Union's launch of the world's
first artificial satellite, Sputnik.
Working at the time for
WALB in Albany, Ga., Barbree caught a glimpse of Sputnik's spent booster rocket
orbiting overhead, then filed radio and TV reports. The one-time farm boy and
Air Force recruit was hooked.
Barbree talked his way to
Cape Canaveral and covered America's humiliating Vanguard launch failure at the
end of 1957 and the following success of the nation's
first satellite, Explorer 1, on Jan. 31, 1958. He joined NBC News from the
cape six months later.
What is remarkable is that
Barbree has been present for all 150 of NASA's manned launches. No other
journalist comes close. Many of those who competed with him over the years
either quit, retired or died. And even a sudden-death experience in 1987 did
not ruin Barbree's record. He dropped dead while running on the beach, was
revived by medics and managed to recuperate in plenty of time for the first post-Challenger
mission.
When asked to comment on
the book, T.J. (Tom) O'Malley, 91, the Mercury-Atlas test conductor who pushed
the launch button for John Glenn's flight, joked, "I wouldn't believe a word
that guy put in there."
Seriously, though, O'Malley
said, there were only three newsmen back then whom he trusted and Barbree was
one of them.
Barbree quickly learned
which Mercury man would be first in space in 1961, despite NASA's efforts to
keep it secret. But because Alan
Shepard himself divulged the news off the record, Barbree couldn't go with
it.
He did break the news 25
years later about the source of the Challenger
launch disaster: O-ring seals in a booster rocket. He went on to become a
semifinalist in the short-lived journalist-in-space project.
"Live from Cape Canaveral" is Barbree's eighth book. He co-authored 1994's "Moon Shot" with Shepard,
Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton and former Associated Press aerospace writer
Howard Benedict, all now gone.
Of all the missions,
Barbree rates Glenn's first orbital ride in 1962 as his favorite, with
Shepard's suborbital flight in 1961 a close second.
Of the three tragedies, the
Apollo
spacecraft fire in 1967 hit him hardest. He mourned the death of commander
Gus Grissom as he would a good friend's.
Indeed, when Barbree talks
about the Mercury Seven, he speaks of Alan, Gus, John, Scott, Wally, Gordo and
Deke as though they were family. He writes that Shepard told him in later years
that not all the stories about him and the other Mercury guys were true. But he
wasn't too bothered by it, Barbree says.
One well-known astronaut,
on the other hand, did not want a rather compromising tidbit about himself
ending up in the book. When Barbree ran into him in May, the astronaut was
visibly relieved his personal foibles would go unmentioned.
Who was it?
"Naturally, I'm not going
to tell you. I would have put it in my book," Barbree said with a laugh. "But
it didn't really belong in the book. The whole idea of the book is not to hurt
somebody."
Kirkus Reviews notes that
Barbree's personal involvement with the astronauts distinguishes his book from
Tom Wolfe's 1979 classic, "The Right Stuff."
"Where Wolfe projected
himself into the astronauts' culture and mind-set, Barbree shared them, and his
enthusiasm for the material is irresistible," Kirkus writes.
Barbree still lives just a
quick drive from the space center with his wife of 47 years, Jo. He intends to keep
covering shuttle missions until the very last one in 2010 and hopes to be
around when astronauts blast off again to the moon, supposedly sometime in the
next decade.
"If my flesh makes it, I
will be in my eighties," Barbree writes. "If not, my spirit won't be far away."
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