#william mccool

May they RIP ❤️

Here's what an official NASA portrait actually is: a bet on the future. William C. McCool sat for this photograph in August 2001 at Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was a pilot. He was an astronaut. He was the kind of person who had cleared every bar the United States military and NASA between them could think to put in front of him — flight school, test pilot school, the astronaut selection process itself, which accepts roughly the percentage of applicants that Harvard Law rejects. The official portrait is a ritual. Everybody does it. You put on the flight suit or the blue suit, you sit in front of the same backdrop they've been using for decades, and someone takes your picture. It goes in the files. It gets used in press releases. It appears on the NASA website next to your biography, which lists your missions — or, if you haven't flown yet, the missions you're assigned to, the ones coming up, the reason you're here. In August 2001, McCool had not yet flown in space. He was assigned to STS-107 as pilot. That mission would launch in January 2003. The portrait is a strange artifact when you sit with it. It's made to project competence, readiness, the confident gaze of someone pointed toward the sky. It's official. It's institutional. It exists to represent a person at a specific moment in a career that everyone, including the subject, expects to continue. McCool is in a flight suit. He is looking at the camera. He is, by every available measure, ready. That's what these portraits are — a record of readiness. A formal acknowledgment that someone has arrived at the threshold. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, August 2001. The paperwork is filed. The photograph is taken. The future is assumed. How many times do we document a moment without knowing it's the document that will matter most?

William McCool by NASA on The Commons Via Flickr: Photographic coverage of STS-107 water survival training / emergency egress training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL). All of the STS-107 crew are wearing orange Launch and Entry Suits (LES). Close-up of McCool before training. Image #: jsc2002-02067 Date: November 13, 2002

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I was wiki'ing 2003 today because my friend is having a "2003 themed" party this weekend and I realized that was the year the Columbia exploded. Willie McCool was a friend of my godfather and the youngest member of the crew. I used to always say that he was my hero when I was a kid because I wanted to be an astronaut so badly. I'll never forget the private tour he gave my family of NASA when I was 6 years old and how when I asked him if he'd been to space yet, he said, "No, but I will someday." And he did. I'm proud that he died fulfilling his dream. I think that's the best we can hope for. 

Proof that Willie McCool was as cool as his name would suggest. . . an in-flight request for another favorite song, Fake Plastic Trees.