OK, if you were to pick the weekend that Walter Cronkite died, you couldn't have picked a more ironic, odd weekend for it to happen.

Cronkite was a huge fan of the space program, and he was incredibly giddy during CBS news coverage of the first moon landing in 1969. And here we are on the 40th anniversary of that very mission. Reminds me of when Charles Schulz died, hours before the very last Peanuts cartoon ran.

The name might not immediately ring a bell, but you know who he is. Jay Barbree is the guy who reports for NBC/MSNBC whenever there is space news or a shuttle launch. It seems like he's had the job forever, and actually, he has. Yesterday Barbree celebrated 50 years of reporting on the space program for the network. In fact, Barbree is the only journalist to cover every single manned mission that the U.S. space program has had, starting in the early 60s. When NASA started the "teacher in space" program in the 1980s, they also started a "journalist in space" program, and Barbree was one of the 40 finalists (both were shut down after the Challenger explosion).

One thing I didn't know was that Barbree also wrote the novel Pilot Error, which was based on an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. He also wrote the book Moon Shot, which was made into a TV documentary in 1994. Happy 50 years, Jay.