I just listened to a brief interview that I cannot let pass. I put something on Facebook about, but I have to expand it just a bit.

MSNBC anchor Brian Williams was interviewing Florida U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson as part of the on-going coverage of this morning’s horrific massacre in Orlando, Fla.

Williams introduced Nelson to his audience as “an astronaut-turned-politician.” He then referenced Nelson’s “many years at NASA” while commenting on the prospect of extra security in the wake of the shooting.

I now want to set the record straight.

Sen. Nelson is a politician-turned-one-flight-astronaut. He served in Congress when he got picked for a flight aboard the space shuttle Columbia in January 1986.

He served as a payload specialist aboard the shuttle. He flew once, came back to Earth and went back to work in Congress.

What is equally fascinating is that Nelson didn’t correct Williams on either occasion.

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Nelson, a Democrat, was the second member of Congress to fly on a shuttle mission. The first was Utah Republican Sen. Jake Garn, who flew aboard the shuttle Discovery a year earlier, in 1985.

Oh, and the third member of Congress to fly? That would be a Democratic senator from Ohio, John Glenn. Yes, that John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth in February 1962 aboard the Mercury capsule.

I should note here that Sen. Glenn had an advantage that his congressional “astronauts” didn’t have. The crews with which Garn and Nelson worked had to translate the jargon they spoke among themselves, as their rookie crewmen weren’t fluent in “astronaut-speak.”

Glenn needed no translator as he trained to fly aboard Discovery in 1998. He knows the language well. He spoke it himself while training with his six other initial American space travelers back in the 1960s.

Check out this video of that shuttle mission.