McCain Flip-Flops on Astronaut Experience

Finally, the Truthful Translations of Political Speech become useful for actual fact-checking purposes!
This week, John McCain was asked a provocative question by the editorial board of the Des Moines Register: why all the hate on taxpayer-funded health insurance proposals from a man who’s lived the majority of his entire adult life covered by government-funded and -administered healthcare systems?
Fortunately, the (non-)answer was caught on tape. But let me direct you to approximately 30 seconds into his response:
“And I have never, um, been an astronaut, but I think I know the challenges of space.”
Now, the context in which this “wtf?” moment occurred was while John McCain was describing his philosophy of public versus private enterprise, and only tangentially touching on the subject of the original question (healthcare, and McCain’s use of it).
But the real question is: wasn’t John McCain really an astronaut once? Let us rewind to 2000, when McCain was contesting the Republican presidential primary against George W. Bush. In a television interview featuring the two men, the brilliant Joshua Pearson – one of the masterminds behind the illustrious yet (unfortunately) now-defunct Emergency Broadcast Network – caught him on tape saying the exact opposite.
In fact, references to space (and especially Star Wars metaphors) are uncannily missing from McCain 4 Prez v. 2.0.