One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

Posted on | May 20, 2010 | No Comments

In case it’s not real obvious which one (or you’re just a wiseguy): one of us hasn’t been to space – me.

It was my great privilege and honor to spend a large portion of Monday and Tuesday this week with three astronauts from Space Shuttle mission STS-131 who just returned from space April 20th – Commander Navy Capt Alan Poindexter, Pilot Air Force Col Jim Dutton, and Mission Specialist Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger.

The occasion was a visit here to Colorado Springs including Challenger Middle School, Challenger Learning Center, Mountain View Elementary School, and the US Air Force Academy that was organized by my close friend Art Romero and which he very graciously allowed me to be a part of.

I’ve known Jim since he was a cadet at USAFA and I was on the staff over 20 years ago, Dex and Dottie I only met this week, but I’ll tell you this about all three of them. I honestly think you couldn’t meet three more impressive and truly just plain nice people on the planet (or I guess off the planet, too – that just rolled right off my tongue that way, I swear). Although Dottie really has the edge there (sorry, guys) – I’d been told more than once before I met her that everybody just loves her, and now I understand why.

Beyond that, it was another tremendous experience and one of those once-in-a-lifetime things you feel very, very lucky to have been involved with. That really doesn’t even begin to cover it, but it’s about all I know to say.

And just like I mentioned a few days ago when talking about Rocky Bleier, same thing applies here, too. If you know me, you know at some point we’ll be talking about service dogs, especially for veterans, and Canine Companions for Independence, and you can bet that happened with my three astronaut friends as well.

Thanks again to everybody who made this possible, starting with Art.