Godspeed John Glenn: 50 years since first US orbit

Astro­naut John Glenn climbs into the Friend­ship 7 space cap­sule atop an Atlas rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Feb. 20, 1962, for the flight which made him the first Amer­i­can to orbit the earth. (Cour­tesy | NASA)

MARCIA DUNN

AP Aero­space Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The name still res­onates and gen­er­ates goose bumps like few oth­ers in the world of spaceflight.

John Glenn.

Even astro­nauts — not just the rest of us mere mor­tals — get mushy talk­ing about Project Mercury’s “clean Marine” who led the country’s charge into orbit.

As the world’s most endur­ing and endear­ing space­man gets set to cel­e­brate what no other liv­ing astro­naut has done — mark the 50th anniver­sary of his own space­flight — he finds him­self in over­drive reflect­ing on what has been an unde­ni­ably charmed, golden life.

First Amer­i­can to orbit the Earth, aboard Friend­ship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962. Old­est per­son to fly in space, at age 77 aboard shut­tle Dis­cov­ery in 1998. U.S. sen­a­tor for four terms and one-time pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. Name­sake of a NASA cen­ter as well as a university’s school of pub­lic affairs.

Now 90 and liv­ing in Colum­bus, Glenn just recently gave up fly­ing and sold his twin-engine Beechcraft Baron. It was tough hop­ping up on a wing to climb aboard the plane. Glenn and his wife, Annie, who turns 92 on Fri­day, both had knee replace­ments last year.

“We decided it was time to pack it in,” Glenn said.

Besides, his goal was to fly the plane until 90, “and I did that.”

With so many bless­ings and accom­plish­ments, there’s still one brass ring Glenn wishes he’d snagged: Apollo 11, the first manned moon land­ing in 1969. It’s a sen­ti­ment he’s shared often with Neil Arm­strong, Ohio’s other revered son and the first man to set foot on the moon.

“I’ve been very for­tu­nate to have a lot of great expe­ri­ences in my life, and I’m thank­ful for them. So I don’t see myself as being envi­ous. But in his case, I’ll make an excep­tion,” Glenn said, laugh­ing, dur­ing an inter­view late last month with The Asso­ci­ated Press.

Arm­strong, for his part, would like one day to be in Glenn’s shoes “and have as much suc­cess in longevity.” He called the mile­stone “the most sig­nif­i­cant of all the space anniversaries.”

“And John Glenn deserves all the hon­ors that his coun­try can bestow,” the 81-year-old Arm­strong wrote in an email. “He is an Amer­i­can patriot.”

Five decades later, Glenn reflects with pride on the accom­plish­ments of all seven of NASA’s orig­i­nal Mer­cury astro­nauts — not just his own.

“It’s amaz­ing to me to look back 50 years and think that it’s been 50 years,” Glenn said, seated in his top-floor office at Ohio State Uni­ver­sity, inside the school of pub­lic affairs that bears his name.

Nearly every day he’s asked about space­flight or NASA, so “it’s remained very vivid to me.”

Glenn is reluc­tant to com­ment on his super­star sta­tus. He’s as mod­est and down-to-Earth as ever. He cites atti­tude and exer­cise — he tries to walk a cou­ple of miles every day — as key to his active longevity.

He walks and talks like a much younger man — stand­ing straight and tall, and ask­ing ques­tions, not just answer­ing them, in a clear and steady voice. He appears almost as robust as he was for his shut­tle ride at age 77.

The only other sur­viv­ing Mer­cury astro­naut, Scott Car­pen­ter, ranks Glenn as tops among the hand-picked mil­i­tary test pilots pre­sented in 1959 as the Mer­cury Seven.

“He’s a very good man,” said Car­pen­ter, 86, who fol­lowed Glenn into orbit on May 24, 1962. “He’s a grown-up man, but he’s still a very good Boy Scout.”

Fifty years ago on Mon­day, Glenn cir­cled Earth three times in five hours, putting Amer­ica on even foot­ing with the Soviet Union. The Sovi­ets already had laid claim to the world’s first man­made satel­lite, Sput­nik, and the first space­man, Yuri Gagarin, who had orbited the globe a year ear­lier. Gagarin logged a full rev­o­lu­tion; the next cos­mo­naut to fly spent an entire day in orbit.

Finally, it was America’s turn to shine. But it was a nail-biter.

Unlike the secre­tive Soviet space pro­gram, NASA con­ducted its manned launches on live TV.

First, a thruster mal­func­tioned in orbit. Glenn had to take man­ual con­trol. Then there were signs that the pro­tec­tive heat shield on his cap­sule was loose.

No one, Glenn included, knew whether he would sur­vive the fiery re-entry. The shield proved to be tight, and Glenn returned a national hero on the scale of Charles Lindbergh.

Just out­side Glenn’s office at Ohio State is the hand con­troller he used to fly the Friend­ship 7 cap­sule. The dis­play box also holds the small failed thruster.

The arti­facts are among more than 1,000 boxloads of mate­ri­als he gave Ohio State for safe­keep­ing and dis­play, with more to come. The items span his entire life, from his small-town Ohio boy­hood to his ace-flying days of World War II and Korea, to NASA to Demo­c­ra­tic U.S. sen­a­tor for his home state for 24 years, to his brief bid for pres­i­dent in 1984.

The cap­sule itself and Glenn’s sil­ver space­suit are at the Smith­son­ian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Glenn hasn’t auc­tioned any of his mem­o­ra­bilia, unlike some space pio­neers who have found them­selves in legal tus­sles with NASA. “I have never sold a sin­gle thing. Nor will I,” Glenn said firmly.

His hope is that the memen­tos drum up inter­est among school­child­ren in space, sci­ence and technology.

A col­lectible from that first flight inspired astro­naut Don­ald Pet­tit, 56, now a res­i­dent of the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion. He recalls get­ting a pair of Red Ball Jets sneak­ers as a boy grow­ing up in Ore­gon, and inside the box was a 45-rpm record of Glenn describ­ing his orbital flight. The record­ing blew Pet­tit away, as did the pho­tos of the pio­neer­ing astro­nauts that appeared in Life mag­a­zine. (Life held exclu­sive rights to the sto­ries of the orig­i­nal Mer­cury Seven astronauts.)

From that moment on, Pet­tit was cap­ti­vated with space, as were so many of his Cold War-born generation.

With Glenn’s flight, “space­flight moved from sci­ence fic­tion to sci­ence fact,” Pet­tit said from orbit last month.

All told, 330 Amer­i­cans have fol­lowed Glenn into orbit.

Glenn was actu­ally the third Amer­i­can — and the fifth per­son — to rocket into space. Alan Shep­ard and Gus Gris­som were con­fined to 15-minute sub­or­bital hops in 1961, the same year the two Soviet cos­mo­nauts blazed trails into orbit.

Amer­ica was badly behind. Unmanned U.S. rock­ets kept explod­ing on the launch pads.

“Rocket per­for­mance was far from pre­dictable,” Arm­strong noted in his email.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher when it came time for Glenn to soar. And fears abounded as to whether a man could sur­vive weight­less­ness: Would his vision be impaired to the point he couldn’t land his ves­sel? Could he swal­low food? Might he become so elated with space that he might never wish to return to Earth?

Glenn often is asked whether he was afraid.

“Are you appre­hen­sive about the sit­u­a­tion you’re in? Yeah, but you vol­un­teered, you want to do this thing, it’s impor­tant for the coun­try, and you’re glad to have been selected for it, and you’re going to do the best job you can pos­si­bly do.”

Ten times Glenn’s launch was delayed. Finally, on the morn­ing of Feb. 20, 1962, Car­pen­ter called out from the block­house, “God­speed John Glenn” moments before the Mercury-Atlas rocket ignited.

Glenn did not hear Carpenter’s poetic send-off until after the flight.

“That meant a lot, and it’s meant a lot since then,” Glenn said. “It just showed we were all work­ing together at that time.”

The words came to Car­pen­ter at that moment. It’s become one of the most mem­o­rable quotes from spaceflight.

What Glenn needed was “sim­ply speed, and it occurred to me that you could ask the higher power for the speed,” Car­pen­ter said ear­lier this month from his win­ter home in South Florida.

“It was an appro­pri­ate bon voy­age, a prayer, good­bye and good luck all wrapped up with a con­cise state­ment, I think,” Car­pen­ter said.

He will join John and Annie Glenn, and their chil­dren, semi­re­tired Dr. David Glenn, and artist Lyn Glenn, in anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tions at Kennedy Space Cen­ter on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day. Mar­ried for 68 years, the Glenns are vir­tu­ally insep­a­ra­ble. They met in the playpen as tod­dlers in New Con­cord, Ohio.

More than 100 retirees who worked on Project Mer­cury also will gather for a reunion this week­end at Cape Canaveral. On Mon­day, the actual anniver­sary, the Glenns will attend an Ohio State gala.

The two sur­viv­ing Mer­cury astro­nauts will pay homage to their deceased col­leagues: Shep­ard, Gris­som, Wally Schirra, Gor­don Cooper and Deke Slayton.

The seven remain bonded forever.

“We were very com­pet­i­tive and we worked very, very hard,” Glenn recalled. “But once some­body had been selected for a flight, you never saw a group get together any tighter than that group to sup­port that flight, and that’s just the way it was. That hap­pened that way on every sin­gle flight.”

They believed strongly in what they were doing, Glenn said.

Once Amer­i­cans achieved orbit and caught up with the Sovi­ets, “I think peo­ple really felt that we really were on the way back, sort of a turn­ing point, I think, in our national psy­che,” Glenn said.

So it’s dis­tress­ing for Glenn that 50 years after his first space­flight, Amer­ica no longer has its own means of get­ting astro­nauts to orbit.

Glenn still rues the day in 2004, one year after the Colum­bia dis­as­ter, that Pres­i­dent George W. Bush announced the space shut­tle pro­gram would end in 2010, to be fol­lowed by a moon base and even­tual Mars expe­di­tions. The lunar idea was shelved by Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, and aster­oids are the newest tar­gets of opportunity.

In the months lead­ing up to the final shut­tle flight last July, Glenn tried, in vain, to per­suade Obama to keep the ships fly­ing until a replace­ment rocket became available.

“It’s unseemly to me that here we are sup­pos­edly the world’s great­est space­far­ing nation and we don’t even have a way to get back and forth to our own Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion,” he said.

NASA remains depen­dent on Rus­sia until U.S. pri­vate indus­try is able to take astro­nauts to the space sta­tion — an esti­mated five years away.

“The lead­ers of tomor­row are on the cam­puses of today,” Glenn likes to say about the John Glenn School of Pub­lic Affairs. When reminded that the astro­nauts of tomor­row are, too, he noted: “If we can just get some­thing for them to ride.”

Posted by AP News on Feb 16 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.