12. ASTRONAUT JERRY M. LINENGER

Jerry M. Linenger is a former NASA astronaut who flew on the Space Shuttle and Space Station Mir and a retired Captain in the United States Navy Medical Corps. In 1997 he spent 132 days, 4 hours and 1 minute in space. This was at the time the longest duration flight of an American male. While aboard Mir, he faced many harrowing circumstances including the most severe fire ever aboard an orbiting spacecraft, a near collision with a resupply cargo ship and a failure of Mir’s onboard oxygen generator. I’m a huge fan of space travel and I could have talked to Captain Linenger for hours about his experience as one of the only 536 people who have ever rocketed into the cosmos. Instead, we sat in silence for 25 minutes. Captain Linenger used that time to read a book and clean out his rain gutter while I flipped through book one of The Walking Dead.