NASA / GETTY IMAGES
	Astronaut William McCool holds a piece of basalt taken from Olympic National Park, which he carried with him on board the space shuttle Columbia. McCool, stationed at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station from 1986 to 1992, was the Columbia's co-pilot.

"As I write, we just experienced a sunset over the Pacific, just east of Chile," the 41-year-old co-pilot of the space shuttle Columbia wrote last week. "I'm sitting on the flight deck ... with a view of the Earth moving gracefully by. Sunsets and sunrises from space come every 45 minutes and last only about 30 seconds, but the colors are stunning."

This was the former Whidbey naval pilot's first and final trip into space — the trip he worked for all of his life.

McCool, stationed here from 1986 to 1992, was a runner, swimmer and a backcountry camper who so loved the Olympics he took a piece of them with him on the flight.

"It's the enthusiasm and contagious sense of wonder and awe that we'll miss about Willie," said base commander Capt. Stephen Black at a press conference here.

Capt. Chuck Brady, a flight surgeon at the naval hospital, recalled a man equally at ease with a class of eager youngsters or a group of engineers.

McCool's flying career took off in the cockpit of the EA-6B Prowler, the Navy's top electronic-warfare aircraft. By 1996, he was flying from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. It was there that he first learned of his astronaut appointment.

When he arrived at the Johnson Space Center, Brady was there, too.

"Willie came to NASA and immediately he was so well liked," said Brady, who had flown on the Columbia in a 1996 mission.

"He did have the heart of a child, the brain of a genius and the courage of a lion," Brady said.

McCool's future seemed almost predetermined. At an early age, he was gluing together model airplanes and wanted to follow in his dad's footsteps, flying for the Navy.

Known as "Cool Willie" in high school in Lubbock, Texas, he ran track and had taken a school-spirit towel on the Columbia space shuttle. He won a race in Brownfield, Texas, in 1979 in which one of his competitors was George W. Bush.

"He was extremely likeable and intelligent," says former Capt. Rosemary Mariner, one of McCool's instructors at a naval-jet training base in Kingsville, Texas, in the mid-'80s.

Al Cantello, McCool's track coach at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., watched McCool blast off into space on Jan. 16.

"You didn't even have to know him or hear him but if you were next to him you became a better person.

"Every person should have one Willie McCool in his life who will get them through. I was lucky enough to have him in my life."

McCool was married and had three sons, aged 14 to 22. While at Whidbey, the family lived on a quite residential street in Anacortes.

"It's about as sad a day as there's been around here in a long time," said Dick Kohler, a former neighbor.

McCool was a gregarious, athletic man, Kohler said, who brought neighbors together for barbecues and loved hiking with his sons.

He was a charter member of the Friends of Olympic National Park. "Over the past 15 years, my family and I have enjoyed numerous outings to the Olympic National Park," McCool wrote in a letter to the group, "We have many fond memories of the peninsula's scenic coastlines, forests and mountains."

Base officials yesterday were considering adding McCool's name to a memorial honoring Prowler pilots killed in combat.

— Warren Cornwall and Craig Welch, with Cheryl Phillips and Miyoko Wolf, The Seattle Times