COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) – On Friday, an astronaut reunited with a professor who made a big impact on his life after nearly 30 years apart.<\/p>\n
Duane \u201cDigger\u201d Carey and Bill Wallisch met for the first time in 1997 when Wallisch taught public speaking courses at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Digger was one of his students that year. <\/p>\n
\u201cNASA expects the astronauts to be the public-facing department for NASA, the public affairs,\u201d Carey said. \u201cWe\u2019re the ones, we\u2019re like, a lot of times we\u2019re the spokesmen and stuff like that. People like to hear what the astronauts are saying. Well, most astronauts are not capable of doing that, so for literally, I guess, a few dozen years, they would hire Bill to come down to Houston and teach astronauts a little bit about public speaking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later on in his life, Carey became a fighter pilot and astronaut with the U.S. Air Force, even piloting a mission to the Hubble Telescope in 2002.<\/p>\n
After retiring from the U.S. Air Force, Digger switched his focus to motivational speaking – something that he credits Wallisch with teaching him.<\/p>\n
\u201cBill has instructed literally hundreds of astronauts over the years, and I was one of them,\u201d Carey said. \u201cI\u2019m surprised, I\u2019m flattered that he remembered who I was, because I was not a particularly bright student, but I did enjoy his class. I learned some things from Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
After nearly 30 years without seeing each other, Carey spoke at Springs Ranch Memory Care, where the man who taught him his speaking skills was in the audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cBill tried to teach me public speaking many years ago,\u201d Wallisch said. \u201cAnd I wanted to prove to him today that I actually listened to some of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 KKTV. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) – On Friday, an astronaut reunited with a professor who made a big impact…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[4,2408,4934,4932,4931,4933,4935,79,193,4930],"class_list":["post-497164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-live-speeches","tag-live-updates","tag-live-video","tag-press-conference","tag-real-time-coverage","tag-science","tag-space","tag-video-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}