BAR HARBOR – Each year, 4,000 highly qualified pilots, scientists and doctors apply to become NASA astronauts. About 20 of these people – half a percent of those who apply – ever soar into outer space.

Charles Hobaugh, a military pilot who spent his earliest years in Bar Harbor, is one of the favored few.

Hobaugh is also the first native Mainer to complete a mission in space.

“I think I’ve got the best job in the world,” Hobaugh said recently by telephone from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

In July, Hobaugh returned from his first trip into space: a two-week stint aboard the shuttle Atlantis, where he served as pilot for a mission charged with installing a $164 million airlock on the international space station.

“Everyone seems to use the world ‘surreal.’ I guess it was surreal. It was almost like it wasn’t happening – like a dream,” he said.

Hobaugh, 39, has been dreaming of space travel since he joined millions of other children in watching the 1969 moon landing on television, imagining that he was bouncing across that foreign landscape in Neil Armstrong’s boots.

“It just made an indelible mark with me,” he said. “It was always something I’d thought about, but I never thought it was realistic. That was a lofty goal.”

When Hobaugh was born, his father was stationed with the U.S. Coast Guard in Hancock County. Hobaugh’s dad now lives Michigan.

At 18, Hobaugh entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., to study aerospace engineering. He spent the next 16 years racking up 3,000 flight hours as an aviator in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Hobaugh flew combat missions in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, taught fellow pilots about aviation warfare, and trained to become a naval test pilot. As he took each step toward becoming qualified to pilot the space shuttle, his childhood dream rested in the back of his mind.

“My plan was, if something fell through, if I’d stopped at any of those points, it still would have been a fantastic job,” Hobaugh said.

In 1996, NASA finally came calling, and Hobaugh was accepted by the astronaut training program among a class tapped for work on Mir and the new international space station.

Pilots statistically have a better chance of being accepted for astronaut training because the pool of qualified applicants is so small, Hobaugh said.

“For everyone else, master’s degrees are just about required, and a Ph.D. or an M.D. is certainly not going to hurt you,” he said.

When Hobaugh began astronaut training, his wife and parents were supportive – thrilled at the prospect of a space flight.

But in the five years that Hobaugh trained and assisted other astronauts from the ground, the reality of his job didn’t sink in for family and friends.

“I don’t think my kids [now 8 and 14] fully realized what I was doing until they saw the launch,” he said.

Astronauts help train their peers by taking part in mission simulations, providing a ground-based communications link for crews in space, sitting through long meetings as technical representatives for NASA, and making speaking appearances at schools.

Hobaugh is training to provide weather data for the crew of the shuttle Endeavor when it flies in late November.

“Basically, there is no routine. Every day is different,” he said. “There are some days that aren’t the most enjoyable day of my life, but it’s a bump in the road.”

July 12, 2001, was a milestone, however.

Just after 4 a.m., Atlantis blasted off and Hobaugh’s three decades of dreaming came to an end.

“It was well worth the wait. Right after the engine cut off, it was almost like we were in slow motion,” Hobaugh said. “I remember looking back and seeing a couple of [fellow astronauts] float by. It was bizarre.”

Shaky nerves have been trained out of the military pilot during his years of service, and the astronaut’s hectic schedule left little time for stargazing. Actually, Hobaugh was surprised at how routine many of his daily tasks felt.

“A lot of the things seemed to just run automatically. Even though you’d never been there before, you’ve done these things over and over in training,” he said.

As the pilot of Atlantis, Hobaugh served under Cmdr. Steven Lindsey as what most Americans would call a co-pilot. He was responsible for calculating and deploying engine blasts to keep the shuttle on its proper course, as well as providing support to Lindsey during the space station docking and the landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Daily lists of duties were sent from Johnson Space Center, so Hobaugh spent his 13 days in space tending to a system of video cameras, providing water, oxygen and nitrogen to the space station, and shooting excess water off into space.

“They plan every minute of your day,” he said.

Too soon, Atlantis began its descent back through Earth’s atmosphere.

“We look for wave-off days [weather-related landing delays] so we can get a little more time in space. It just seemed to fly by,” Hobaugh said. “I tried to go look out the window as much as I could, taking pictures of the Earth below and of my crewmates. I went through quite a bit of film.

“I sometimes tend to think, ‘My job is my job.’ We forget how neat what we do really is,” he said.