OBITUARY John Glenn
OBITUARY
John Glenn
Astronaut and politician who became the first American to orbit the earth and, 36 years later, the oldest person in space
Glenn looks into a globe known as the "Celestial Training Device" at Cape Canaveral in 1962
When John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth — the feat made him the most famous man in the world — he watched with wonder from far above. Thirty-six years later, after a second career in politics, he made history again, becoming the oldest person in space at the age of 77.
Glenn’s early exploits were the subject of the Tom Wolfe book, The Right Stuff. The phrase came to be used as a pithy description of Glenn’s character, specifically his calmness under pressure.
A clean-cut military veteran whose diligence, courage and brilliance took him from small-town America to space, he was a national hero at a time when the country looked to its space programme as a source of pride and confidence. It was during the Cold War and the pressure was on Nasa to equal and then exceed Soviet achievements. He remained an iconic figure to later generations.
The flight was first scheduled for January 23, 1962, but was postponed ten times and did not take place until the middle of February. Glenn had to be squeezed into a tiny capsule, nine storeys up, on top of Atlas, a rocket adapted from a US Air Force ballistic missile.
At 9.47am local time on February 20, the rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, and after 5 minutes and 15 seconds of lift, Glenn was into orbit. He spent nearly five hours in space at a maximum altitude of 162 miles before re-entering the atmosphere. He had seen the sun rise and set three times. “The moment of twilight is simply beautiful,” he said from high over the Indian Ocean.
He was not the first man into orbit, since the Russians had beaten America to it, sending Yuri Gagarin up 10 months before, and then Gherman Titov. Still, Glenn’s mission was treated by Nasa not as a defence or security matter but as a global spectacular. The launch was televised in many countries and the people of Perth in Australia showed their support by switching on tens of thousands of lights so that the city would be visible from space.
In the best traditions of adventure, not everything went smoothly. Around the end of the first orbit, Glenn had to assume manual control because the autopilot failed.
Also, during the flight, ground monitors picked up a warning signal suggesting that the heat shield needed to prevent the Friendship 7 capsule from being incinerated on re-entry had come loose. Glenn was not told this in so many words but realised that something was not quite right from the instructions he was given.
When he burst back into the atmosphere, pieces of the container of the rockets used to slow him down broke off and flew past his window in flaming chunks. It was, he said over the radio, “a real fireball”.
Later, he recalled with no small understatement, he “had some moments of doubt whether the heat shield itself was breaking. That would have been bad all round.” When he was back on terra firma, The Times’ report described him as “Hale and hearty after 5 hours at 17,545 mph”.
Glenn was treated to a celebrity’s welcome in New York a few days after his return. He rode up Broadway in an open car which was showered from above with an estimated 3,500 tons of ticker-tape and torn-up phone books. It was just 35 years since the city had given the same accolade to Charles Lindbergh after his solo trip from the US to Paris.
Glenn was also introduced to the Mayor of Perth. “I was afraid he’d brought the electricity bill with him,” he joked. Three months after the flight a documentary film of the entire trip was shown in London. This newspaper’s film critic was impressed by Glenn’s modesty and calm in the face of potential disaster: “Even when there is a hint that all is not going to plan (the business over the loose heat shield) and he is cut off from all contact with earth, there is only a slight narrowing of the eyes to indicate that he is any more concerned than a motorist caught in a minor skid might be.”
The writer was less taken with the soundtrack, opining that: “There is no excuse for that celestial choir which heralds the rocket’s launching.”
One mystery turned out to have a prosaic explanation. Glenn observed a strange phenomenon outside his window, telling mission control over the radio: “I’m in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent.”
Initially intrigued, Nasa analysts later dashed the hopes of UFO enthusiasts by deciding that the yellow-green “fireflies” were frozen crystals of his urine and sweat being vented outside.
John Herschel Glenn Jr was born in Cambridge, Ohio, in 1921. Called “Bud” by friends and family, he was as cheerful, good-natured and kind as a character from a Norman Rockwell painting. As a student he was above average and a keen sportsman, and while still at college he fell in love with a local girl, Anna Castor. They married in 1943.
Glenn had heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014. In recent years he had a stroke and suffered from fading eyesight. Shortly before his death he was admitted to a hospital at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. The campus is home to the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, which offers public policy degrees. His wife, Anna, whom he called Annie, survives him along with their two children, Lyn, an artist, and David, a doctor.
Around the time of one delayed launch attempt, the US vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, went to visit Anna, only for her to ignore his knock at the door. Because of a terrible stutter — which she virtually cured in later life — she generally relied on her husband to talk for her in public. “I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but I just knew I couldn’t talk to him.” Speaking to his wife on the phone, Glenn backed her decision to the hilt. She was always a great source of strength and encouragement to him.
He gained a degree in engineering from Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio — one of nine institutions later to award him honorary doctorates. As a pilot who flew more than 120 missions in the Second World War and then in Korea, he was courageous, winning the US Distinguished Flying Cross six times and the Air Medal among numerous other awards.
Probably the only disappointment he ever caused in his homeland was to his father, John Sr, who had hoped that he would take over the family plumbing business.
During the Second World War, Glenn flew on 59 combat missions with fighter bombers in the Marshall Islands. He then became an advanced flight instructor in Texas, before seeing active service again in Korea, flying in Sabre aircraft on 90 missions. In the final days of the war he shot down three MIG fighters in combat along the Yalu river.
Glenn became interested in the practical problems of flying at high altitudes and great speeds and went on to a school for test pilots at the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland. In 1957 he broke the speed record between Los Angeles and New York, making the 2,500 mile journey in three hours and 23 minutes.
He was appointed to the fighter design branch of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, which also enabled him to study engineering at the University of Maryland. In April 1959 he was selected as one of the Mercury Seven: the seven astronauts for Nasa’s first manned space programme, Project Mercury. Glenn was the last surviving member of the group.
At President Eisenhower’s direction, candidates were chosen from a pool of the US military’s finest test pilots. The final seven were picked following a gruelling set of physical and psychological tests. Unsure of precisely what stresses and strains space flight might place on the human body, Nasa scientists conducted what at the time was perhaps the most detailed set of medical examinations ever performed.
During mental assessments, the candidates were asked questions such as: “Whom would you assign to the mission if you could not go yourself?” and “Who am I?”
Stamina was tested by placing the would-be astronauts on treadmills and tilt tables, putting their feet in ice water, asking them to blow up balloons, dosing them with castor oil — a laxative — and enduring enemas. Above-average height, though, was not an advantage, given the small size of the spacecraft. Glenn was 5ft10in, one inch below the limit.
A friend, Tom Miller, told the New York Times in 1983 that Glenn tried to ensure he would meet the standard by putting weight on his head to compress his body. “He’d be sitting down reading with a big bunch of books sitting on his head. In some cases, he’d put a belt kind of around his chin and hold them, or if he was sitting real still reading, he could balance them up and read,” he said.
Given his seniority (he was close to the age limit, and balding) he was disappointed not to be chosen for the first manned suborbital flights in 1961. In retrospect, it is ironic that Nasa was criticised at the time for choosing someone as old as 40 to send into space. When asked why he volunteered, Glenn replied: “I figured it would probably be the nearest I’d ever get to heaven.”
This was typical of his humour, but not true to his philosophy, for he and his wife were practising Presbyterians who had had some doubts about the ethics of space exploration and had discussed the matter carefully with members and ministers of the Church. If essentially strait-laced, he had a light-hearted side. His imitation of ET, the extra-terrestrial in the Steven Spielberg film, was said to be excellent.
Trevor Brown, dean of the Glenn public affairs college, said in a statement: “Even after leaving public life, he loved to meet with citizens, school children in particular. He thrilled to music and had a weakness for chocolate.”
Deeply affected by the assassination of his friend John F Kennedy in November 1963, Glenn resigned from Nasa to announce his candidature for the Democratic nomination as a senator for Ohio. He was also upset that he had not been given a swift return to space; Kennedy was loath to allow another dangerous mission and risk the loss of an icon.
So little was then known of Glenn’s politics that it had been assumed that he was a Republican. Less than three months later he withdrew from the contest, having slipped in his bathroom and hit his head, which caused recurrent dizziness and nausea.
He became a wealthy businessman, working as a senior executive with Royal Crown Cola and the Questor conglomerate, and presented a television series, Great Explorations.
He failed in a further bid for the Senate in 1970, when his Republican opponent spent five times as much money as he did. He subsequently called for the financing of campaigns to be reformed. Finally, in the post-Watergate election of 1974 he was elected by an overwhelming margin — and inevitably said to be “over the moon”.
He served as a senator until 1999 and proved to be a decent, middle-of-the-road Democrat, who mugged up on the issues rather than having deep convictions about them. His decency was affronted when his minders advised him how he could appeal most ruthlessly to minority groups or milk the applause. He was in favour of more education and more healthcare, against discrimination, and spent a lot of time on the detail of energy policy. He worked to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons and improve governmental efficiency.
In 1976 he was shortlisted as a running-mate for Jimmy Carter, but even by that technocrat’s standards he was dull and he was dropped after an especially tedious speech. A commentator said that if Glenn ever gave a fireside chat he would put the fire out.
With his public image buoyed by a positive depiction in the 1983 film adaptation of The Right Stuff, in which he was portrayed by Ed Harris, Glenn sought the nomination to run against Ronald Reagan in 1984. (Not that he adored the Academy Award-winning movie, telling a reporter he disputed its characterisation of him as a “pious saint”.) However, he dropped out with his campaign heavily in debt. The next time round he was mentioned again as a possible running mate for Michael Dukakis.
In 1989 he was one of five senators who were accused of trying to shield one of America’s notorious Savings and Loans companies, the collapse of which cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Glenn was cleared of wrongdoing by the Senate’s Ethics Committee, though it accused him of exercising poor judgment.
On the ground he could never match his stellar reputation; political opponents mockingly asked: “What on earth has he done?” In 1997, Nasa announced that it was to send him back into space in his late seventies. The excuse was that scientific monitoring might discover more about the deterioration of bone which occurs through aging and lack of gravity; more pertinently, both Glenn and Nasa were in need of a public relations boost.
At 77 he was by far the oldest astronaut when he and five others were sent on the Space Shuttle Discovery in October 1998. He was fit enough to fly his own plane across the US. However, his son publicly declared his opposition and critics called it a stunt. Glenn was in heroic mode, saying, “Don’t pray for my safety, pray I’ll be useful”; others said that Nasa was proving nothing more than it had in 1962.
He served as a payload specialist for the nine-day research mission, which orbited the earth 134 times and was relatively uneventful compared with his time on Friendship 7. The re-entry, at 3Gs, was half as fast as in 1962.
He enjoyed a second ticker-tape reception in New York after his second return to Earth, though not on the scale of the first. “Just because you’re up in years some doesn’t mean you don’t have hopes and dreams and aspirations just as much as younger people do,” he said.
In recent years he expressed his disappointment at the mothballing of Nasa’s shuttle programme amid budget cuts. The success of Mercury laid the foundations for the lunar landing that would come in 1969 and see the US win the greatest prize in the space race. In recent years, though, Nasa has signed deals with Russia’s space agency to carry astronauts into space on their craft.
John Glenn, astronaut and politician, was born on July 18, 1921. He died on December 8, 2016, aged 95
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