“I never did believe their claims they were technically superior to us, although they had gotten a little ahead of us in manned space flight,’’ he said.
As part of the 50th anniversary ceremonies, Glenn and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will appear today at Ohio State University to open a two-day program about spaceflight, including a chat with the astronauts aboard the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth.
Glenn’s flight was the first in a series of American triumphs — from the two-man Gemini capsules that stayed in space for as long as 13 days to the 1969 moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and culminating with the 1982 flight of the huge space shuttle Columbia.
For today’s young Americans, it may be difficult to understand the sway Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts had on America. At a time of soaring American self-confidence, they were the can-do and daring pilots willing to do what others had only dreamed about for years.
Glenn, thanks to his fly-by-the-book and conscientious style, emerged as the most famous of them all. In the heady days after his flight, he addressed a joint session of Congress. He was the star attraction with the other Mercury astronauts in a ticker-tape parade before four million people in New York City. He capitalized on his fame to be elected as a U.S. senator from Ohio, working in a Senate office building just a few blocks from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum where Friendship 7, the spacecraft Glenn made his first voyage to space in, is displayed.
Three decades later when Glenn blasted off in the shuttle Discovery as a 77-year-old ex-senator, his star reputation pumped new life into a space program that had become more routine than high adventure. Time Magazine featured him on its cover, hundreds of reporters descended on Cape Canaveral to chronicle the flight, and President Bill Clinton flew down to watch the launch.
His status as a national hero was reaffirmed. Yet Glenn’s ascent from Marine pilot to space icon has often puzzled observers. After all, he was not the first American in space; that honor belonged to Alan Shepard a year earlier on a 15-minute sub-orbital flight.
Nor was he the first man to orbit the Earth. Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov of the Soviet Union on separate missions in 1961 circled the globe with Titov’s capsule ,making a then-unheard of 17 orbits.
“It’s a great question and has always fascinated me as well,’’ said Neal Thompson, author of the book “Light This Candle – The Life and Times of Alan Shepard, America’s First Spaceman.”
But, said Thompson, “Shepard’s flight, while it was an impressive one and got us into space, it didn’t put us ahead of the Russians. What Glenn achieved was taking the entire space program to the next level and putting us ahead of the other guys.
“He was comfortable being the public face of the astronaut program and eloquent as well in describing his role. He embraced it and he was good at it.’’
Fate also played a role. After Shepard was selected for the first space flight, scheduled for March of 1961, Glenn was crushed, convinced that he hurt himself with his lecture to the astronauts to behave themselves while off-duty and keep their “pants zipped.’’
Instead, Glenn was bumped to the third flight, which would be the first to orbit the Earth. For its time, it was a daring leap into space although by today’s standards, the flight was primitive.
Unlike the typical space shuttle with its assorted laptops, the Friendship 7 did not have a single computer aboard for the simple reason nobody could manufacture one small enough for the claustrophobic capsule.
When Glenn returned to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998, an astronaut could dine on turkey tetrazzini, beef Stroganoff and shrimp cocktail. By contrast, aboard the Mercury capsule Glenn had one choice: Applesauce squeezed from a tube.
And nobody could really be certain that the 125-ton Atlas D rocket would actually work as designed. Everybody remembered the time the Mercury astronauts gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch a test of the Atlas rocket.
The rocket lifted off, but one minute later exploded at 27,000 feet, a fireball that Glenn said looked “like an atomic bomb going off over our heads.’’ As the wreckage fell safely in the ocean, Glenn, in his 1999 memoir, recalled Shepard saying, “Well, I’m glad they got that out of the way.’’
As Glenn waited that February morning on top of another Atlas rocket loaded with 250,000 pounds of fuel, he was eager to go. “I guess it was a little like combat,’’ Glenn said. “You know there are hazards, but you’re trained and you have a lot of confidence in your equipment and ability.’’
At 9:42 a.m., the Atlas roared off the launching pad and people all over the world heard Scott Carpenter say by radio, “Godspeed John Glenn.’’
For the next four hours and 56 minutes, Glenn’s capsule orbited the Earth three times. He had what he later described in his book as “a beautiful view of the African coast,’’ witnessed a stunning sunset over the Indian Ocean, and was dazzled by the thousands of lights that had been switched on for him at night in Perth, Australia.
After three orbits, the capsule was poised to land. Ground controllers waited until the Friendship 7 was in the middle of re-entry to warn Glenn there might be trouble with his heat shield, which was designed to keep the capsule from burning up during the intense heat of re-entry.
“That was very irritating,’’ Glenn said. “It’s one of the things I talked about in the debriefing. There never should be any hesitancy to tell the astronaut up there. No matter how small or trivial, tell the pilot.’’
The heat shield worked flawlessly as 50,000 people gazed with apprehension from the Florida beaches and millions more anxiously watched on TV as John Glenn splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean.
During the debriefing he said, “What can you say about a day when in which you get to see four sunsets?”
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