Barbree grew up on his family's farm in Early County, Georgia, and entered the United States Air Force in 1950, when he was 16 years of age.

[3] Following the Air Force, Barbree began his broadcast journalism career at WALB in Albany, Georgia, where, in 1957, he saw Sputnik's spent booster rocket orbiting in the sky and then wrote radio and television reports about the Soviet Union's launch of the first artificial satellite.

[6][7][8][9] Barbree was so interested in the space program that he paid for his ticket to get to Cape Canaveral in Florida in 1957 to watch the attempted Vanguard TV-3 launch.

Eventually, Barbree was hired by radio station WEZY in Cocoa Beach, Florida and worked as a traffic reporter, covering the space program as well.

[3] Six months later, Barbree joined NBC as a part-time space program reporter, eventually moving to full-time.

[10] In 1958, while in a restroom, Barbree overheard a general and a NASA official talking about an upcoming launch called "Project SCORE", one of the earliest American satellites.

[6] This would become one of Barbree's many scoops when after a bit of digging, he found that President Dwight D. Eisenhower would use the satellite to broadcast a pre-recorded Christmas message from outer space.

In his book, Barbree wrote that in 1961, Alan Shepard told him an "off the record" fact: he was going to be the first American astronaut in space.

[20][21] Following the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident, Barbree was the first reporter to break the news of an internal NASA memo expressing concerns about foam striking the orbiter's left wing during ascent.

[24] He never missed a mission launch, despite suffering a heart attack while jogging along Cocoa Beach in 1987, and being declared clinically dead for several minutes.

Barbree's book attempts to illustrate how the media has changed in their coverage of the space programs, from early enthusiasm to relative disinterest.

[18] Barbree attempts to illustrate this in his memoir by telling of a private investigator who approached him with an audio tape which allegedly contained proof of an extramarital affair involving an astronaut.