R.I.P.: Jay Barbree, Longtime NBC Space Correspondent

Jay Barbree, a longtime space reporter for NBC who began covering U.S. rocket launches before there even was a NASA, has died at age 87, the TV network announced Friday night.

The Orlando Sentinel reports Barbree covered his first launch from what’s now known as the Kennedy Space Center in 1957; NASA wasn’t created until 1958. NBC said that Barbree covered more than 166 human spaceflight missions, from the Mercury program to the space shuttle’s days.

He’s the only journalist who covered every U.S. manned space mission. His space career began in 1957, when he was working for an Albany, Ga., radio station and paid his way to Cape Canaveral to cover the launch of the Vanguard rocket.

It exploded on the pad, but Barbree was hooked on space.

“I wanted to go to Cape Canaveral,” he said.

Barbree moved down a year later and never left. He retired in 2017 at age 83, but he’s been busy as ever lately working for Discovery Channel, National Geographic and the American Spaceflights website.

With Apollo 11′s 50th anniversary on the horizon, it seems everybody wants to tap the memories of the preeminent eyewitness to U.S. space history.

Barbree even predates NASA, which didn’t officially arrive until Oct. 1, 1958. America’s entry into the Space Race against the Soviet Union coincided with the arrival of television sets in millions of homes across America.

Those events combined to produce the greatest reality TV show ever. Astronauts were the stars, though the coverage also propelled the careers of journalists like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and Jules Bergman.

Barbree was a shoe-leather reporter, not a glamour boy anchor. He was the guy NBC’s stars turned to when they needed to know what was really going on.