Willie McCool - Running ManPilot Willie McCool was born in San Diego and grew up in many different cities. He called Lubbock Texas his hometown.
McCool didn't set out to become an astronaut, he wanted to fly airplanes. McCool followed his father's career as a Navy pilot. Willie was accepted at the US Naval Academy and graduated second in his class of 1,083 students.McCool's passion was long distance running. He remembers Coach Ganney, his high school track and country coach, and Coach Al Cantello, his Navy Academy coach as important influences in his life.
As a career Navy aviator from a career military family McCool spent most of his life moving from assignment to assignment. He said, "Bottom line is I really haven't lived in one house for longer than three years until my family settled in Anacortes, Washington. That's where we truly call home. What convinced us [where to live] is the Navy telling us where we had to go and when we had to go."
After becoming a Navy test pilot McCool realized that he had the necessary qualifications to become an astronaut and thought that it would be something interesting to do. He applied and was selected as an astronaut in 1996.
The other pilot astronauts in the 1996 class were all assigned to flights to the International Space Station or Hubble Space Telescope, while McCool got the least glamorous flight from a pilot's perspective - a microgravity mission without any rendezvous, spacewalks, or robot arm tasks. But he says he wasn't jealous of the other pilots - and they should be jealous of him because from his perspective STS-107 was a wonderful mission to be assigned to.
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