On Monday March 3, 2014 the American astronaut William Reid Pogue passed away. He was a veteran of the Skylab space laboratory who became an author, a speaker and an educator after his career at NASA.
William Reid Pogue was born on January 23, 1930 in Okemah, Oklahoma, into a family descended from the tribe of Native American Choctaw. He earned a bachelor of science in education in 1951 at Oklahoma Baptist University and a master of science in mathematics in 1960 at Oklahoma State University. In 1974 he received an honorary doctorate in science from Oklahoma Baptist University.
William Reid Pogue enlisted in the Air Force in 1951, serving on the American bombers during the Korean War. Between 1955 and 1957 he was part of the USAF Thunderbirds, the American aerobatic flight team. Over the years, he learned to fly more than 50 models of British and American aircraft and obtained the qualification as a civilian flight instructor.
Between 1960 and 1963, William Reid Pogue served as assistant professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Subsequently, he spent two years as a test pilot with the British Ministry of Aviation in a USA/RAF exchange program. In 1965, with the rank of colonel, he started his second career at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.
William Reid Pogue was one of the 19 astronauts selected by NASA in 1966. He was a member of the support team for the Apollo 7, 11 and 14 missions. After the cancellation of the Apollo program, he was assigned to the Skylab program. As a pilot of the Skylab 4 mission, he departed on November 16, 1973 and returned to Earth on February 8, 1974. At the time, it was the longest manned space mission ever.
After retiring from the Air Air and NASA in 1975, William Reid Pogue remained in the field working as an aerospace consultant and as speaker and educator. He produced video on space flight and in 1991 published the book “How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space?”, in which answered 270 questions he received during his speeches in schools. In 1992 he also published a science fiction novel, “The Trikon Deception”, with writer Ben Bova.
In the course of his work as a speaker, William Reid Pogue was asked other questions, to which he replied in a new book, “Space Trivia”, published in 2003. In 2011 he published his autobiography, “But for the Grace of God: An Autobiography of an Aviator and Astronaut”.
William Reid Pogue is one of the men who really boldly went where no one had gone before, helping to extend the limits of duration of space missions. The current missions to the International Space Station are also the legacy of his experience on Skylab and his subsequent consultations. For these reasons, in the course of his life he received many honors from the Air Force, NASA and other organizations and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the American astronauts.
