Barry "Butch" Wilmore tries to follow college football as much as anyone born and raised in the South.
At home in Texas, though, he can't seem to watch a full game without being interrupted. His wife limits his time on the couch, he said, while his children make him change the channel on Saturday afternoons.
"I wish I could watch more Southeastern Conference footballor any football," he said. "Sometimes, in the middle of the football game, I end up watching 'My Little Pony.' "
He's going to outer space.
Wilmore is a NASA astronaut. He is currently far from SEC territory, at a cosmonaut training center in Russia, and he'll soon be much farther. Next week, from a launch site in Kazakhstan, Wilmore will lift off aboard a Soyuz rocket for a mission to the international space station, where he will take over in November as expedition commander.
In one giant leap for mankind, though, Wilmore will tune into college football while in orbit.
NASA has arranged for Wilmore, a former Tennessee Tech linebacker who still roots for the University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt, to catch some games live from the space station. But streams will cut out as his temporary home passes through satellites. So he also asked to have games recorded and uplinked as computer files through a DVR-like setup for astronauts. Some of those games, like the ones on the new SEC Network, aren't even available to everyone on Earth.
