Lake Highlands native James Reilly with the Earth’s horizon in the background: Photo courtesy of NASA
Commander Rick Sturckon and specialist James Reilly in the International Space Station’s lab:
Photo courtesy of NASA
James Reilly, Lake Highlands High School class of 1972, has departed Earth three times.
He worked construction on the International Space Station, a large habitable satellite that reportedly can be seen from Earth in the proper conditions. But Reilly — pilot, astronaut, geologist — also has explored the depths and far reaches of this planet. He was part of a 1977 scientific expedition to remote areas of Antarctica, and he traveled in submarines while working with the U.S. Navy and a Florida-based oceanographic research institution. After high school, Reilly ran a roofing company, earned three degrees at the University of Texas at Dallas and launched a career as an oil-and-gas exploration geologist. In the mid 1980s, he applied to the astronaut program at NASA.
After eight years of filling out those applications, he got a call from NASA.
“I was actually out working on a rig in the gulf when they called me in for an interview,” Reilly says.
[quote align=”left” color=”#000000″] “You have to take a few seconds sometimes — the views are phenomenal. You see all the colors and textures of the Earth. It is amazing.” [/quote]The interview was short but was followed by a solid week of physical, mental and psychological testing. “Of the 20 that were in my group [narrowed down from some 3,000 of the most qualified candidates] my resume was the thinnest, but I somehow got in.”
He promptly resigned from his job and moved his family, including two adolescent-aged children, to Houston. His first mission was in 1998. “You’d think that you would get nervous,” he says, “strapping into a highly explosive, million-pound ship, but I was pretty calm. Once you get to that point, you’ve simulated all possibilities in training. The night before the flight, I was standing on the launch pad and one of the mechanics walks over and says, ‘We will make sure you are 100 percent safe,’ and I believed him.”
In space, he says, he worked 16-hour days, but never lost appreciation. “It’s difficult to come up with a way to describe the experience. You are floating, disoriented, you have to get used to doing things like walking across the room, which is now floating across a room. But you have to take a few seconds sometimes — the views are phenomenal. You see all the colors and textures of the Earth. It is amazing.”
At Lake Highlands High School, he says, the teachers set the foundation for his success. He recalls physics teacher Mr. Wolf, especially, and Eddie Green, the director of the band in which Reilly played trombone. Incredibly, Reilly says, he recently ran into Green at a performance of his son’s high school band in Houston. “After the show they gave special thanks to Eddie Green and I thought, ‘No, it couldn’t be,’ but sure enough I went backstage afterwards and knew just by hearing his voice that it was him. It was good to see him again.”
