World Waits Once Again
Like Glenn, Americans relishing the trip back
October 29, 1998
by Laura Parker
In the buildup to John Glenn's return to space, one
of the talking heads on TV tried to throw cold water on
the whole thing. The unmanned Mars Pathfinder, he said,
is the hero of space travel today, more deserving of
ballyhoo than an aging astronaut.
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John Glenn: Return to Orbit
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Now and then: John Glenn prepares for
today's flight, left, and for his first flight
in 1962. |
The Sunshines of Denver would dispute that. Gary and
Lin Sunshine, who were both in the third grade when
Glenn first went aloft, took their children, Liz, Becca
and B.J., to Washington this week to gaze upon
Friendship 7, the charred relic that carried Glenn into
orbit in 1962. The capsule is now on display at the
National Air and Space Museum.
Gary, 44, and 9-year-old B.J. think the Pathfinder is
cool. But, as Gary, a sales manager, says delicately,
the Pathfinder "lacks a human element."
"Astronauts," he says, "add danger and excitement
that you can't get from a machine." And what better
astronaut to get excited about than one who will let you
relive a magic moment of your youth, this time with your
kids?
"I remember being riveted to the TV set the first
time," says Lin, 44, a legal secretary. "They wheeled
the TV into our classroom. Everything came to a stop.
The whole world watched."
There is something about Glenn's voyage today that
has captured the world's attention. About 250,000
spectators are expected to be at Cape Canaveral to watch
when the space shuttle Discovery lifts off at 2 p.m. ET.
That will be the biggest audience for a space launch in
a decade, now that shuttle trips have become almost as
mundane as airline flights.
Glenn's liftoff will be televised live on nearly
every television and cable network, even QVC, the
shopping channel. Walter Cronkite, 81, will be at the
helm at CNN, just as he was for CBS in 1962. The world
may not stop and hold its collective breath this time,
as was the experience then. But the citizens of Perth,
Australia, will again flick on all the lights as a
salute, just as they did when he passed over in 1962.
And across America, hundreds of thousands of school
children will be watching in their classrooms.
So what is it about this mission, the 123rd in
American history, that has galvanized the country? Is it
a reawakened yearning for the adventure of space? Do
Americans vicariously enjoy the triumph of an elder
breaking through the age barrier and reliving the high
point of his life? Or is this simply a giant nostalgia
trip back to the '60s staged by a media-savvy space
agency for people over 40?
"For John Glenn to go back again is like all of us
going back again," says Bruce Murray, president and
founder of The Planetary Society in Pasadena, Calif. "It
touches a nerve. Vicariously, it is us."
The Planetary Society, with its 100,000 members,
supports all things having to do with space, manned and
unmanned. A second flight for one of the original
Mercury seven astronauts, at age 77, is a significant
event. But Murray confesses that he is "pleasantly
surprised" by the intensity of the interest by the rest
of the country.
American phenomenon
To Henry Waas, 74, it's not so hard to figure. To him
the launch is one of those uniquely American phenomena,
almost mystical, like baseball. He drove into
Titusville, on Florida's space coast, a full week ago
and parked his RV at a Shell station along U.S. 1, with
a clear view across the Indian River to the launch pad.
The mission "just seems to have a lot more
importance" than its predecessors, he says. "Just like
baseball had a lot more importance when Mark McGwire was
in there hitting."
Kate Connors, 50, a home health care nurse in Harsens
Island, Mich., says the country needs a boost in an era
of White House scandals.
"After what happened with the president, we can all
feel like heroes again instead of merely being
embarrassed," she says.
Glenn's first mission did make America feel good
again. But even as nostalgia, it's a bit complicated.
The early '60s were hardly a simpler or even a safer
time, historians say.
"This was the height of the craziness of Cold War,
that period after the Russian atomic bomb and before the
Cuban missile crisis, when the big question in most
people's minds was not whether there was going to be
World War III, but when," says Alex Roland, a former
NASA historian, now chairman of the history department
at Duke University.
In 1962, the Soviets were ahead in space, first with
the satellite Sputnik, then with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin,
who in 1961 became the first man to orbit Earth.
"It just seemed like we weren't going to catch up,"
Roland says. "Glenn didn't catch us up, but he got us
into the same ballpark, and that really encouraged
people to think if we were in the same ballpark, we
could beat them."
That Glenn did it strapped into Friendship 7, a tinny
and extremely small capsule, is a source of amazement
for almost everyone who drops by the Air and Space
Museum to take a look. It stands in the lobby, its
instrument panel so primitive with toggle switches and
not much more that it provokes a visceral reaction of
fear.
"It looks like a tin can," says B.J. Sunshine,
gasping.
Everyone thought so then, too. Glenn was known as
"Spam in a Can."
A show stopper in 1962
On Feb. 20, 1962, the day Glenn became the first
American to orbit Earth, nobody, apparently, got much
work done. So they say. The Voice of America broadcast
news of the mission on the radio overseas in 36
languages. At Grand Central Station in New York, 9,000
commuters watched on a giant television screen. The New
York subway system broadcast updates on loudspeakers on
the platforms. Pope John XXIII was kept informed. Queen
Elizabeth congratulated President Kennedy for the
"historic achievement." The lights went on in Perth
spontaneously. Glenn saw them from above, and Perth
became the City of Lights.
For some Americans today, the pleasure will lie in
seeing someone close the circle. Glenn always wanted to
go into space again. Other astronauts among the original
seven got second flights. But he became such an enormous
hero -- to this day, his ticker tape parade through
Manhattan holds the record for confetti thrown -- that
NASA didn't dare risk his life again. With this mission,
he has an opportunity to do what so few people get a
chance to do. It is, someone said, the ultimate
mulligan.
Glenn also "helps us all to reconnect," says the Very
Rev. Nathan Baxter, dean of Washington National
Cathedral. "We're reconnecting with a heightened sense
and awareness of what space exploration might be about."
Glenn's mission, Baxter adds, "really does heighten
our awareness of God's glory and the mystery of
creation, that there is something more than this earthly
reality."
The mission is not without its naysayers, most
prominent among them Roland, one of NASA's strongest
critics.
"Manned space flight is really pretty boring and John
Glenn reminds us of the day when it was really pretty
exciting," he says. "At one time we really believed that
astronauts were opening up a new frontier and it was
going to move on quickly into the pioneering age of
space colonies and missions to Mars. None of that has
happened, so we are just remembering the salad days of
his flight."
NASA should stop the shuttle flights, he says, and
invest the savings in automated spacecraft and the
development of new launch vehicles. He is especially
critical of the experiments Glenn plans to perform.
"It ought to embarrass NASA to be calling it science.
It's a facade. The scientists don't even care about it,"
he says. "This is a grand old man who's retiring, and
we're going to give him a ride. We don't have to invent
this silly pretext."
Among certain upscale 20-somethings -- born not only
after Glenn's flight but after the moon landings -- the
flight simply lacks fizz.
"It's refreshing to revisit something like John Glenn
if you're, like, our grandparents' age," says Jenna
Peterson, 27, who writes a public affairs column called
Jen-X for America Online. "A lot of people don't
necessarily know who he is. Neil Armstrong would be the
guy you'd think of."
Still captivating
Lest anyone conclude that the Glenn show is merely
for People Who Were Alive Back Then, consider the work
of Amye Love's second-grade class in Vienna, Va. The
class of 7-year-olds includes, at least this week, one
future astronaut, Dillon Cradlin.
Right before watching today's launch, they, too, made
the pilgrimage to see Friendship 7. Even from a
7-year-old's perspective, Glenn's capsule seemed small.
"He was very, very smooshed," observed curly-haired
Maha Aljouhar.
For a month now, the children have been deep into
astronaut lore. They've built space shuttles with
plastic bottles. They've practiced moon landings. They
know their astronauts and they have certain opinions.
Glenn couldn't possibly have been scared about sitting
atop that rocket, for instance, because Alan Shepard
went first.
Still, they have not entirely breached the
generational divide. Peering into the window that Glenn
looked out of 37 years ago, Aljouhar speculated that
Glenn must have been hungry because there clearly was no
room for food on the flight.
This led to a discussion among the second graders of
early astronaut cuisine. One of the adults mentioned
that the astronauts had Tang, the orange powdered drink
invented for space travel that became a baby boomer
favorite. But on this matter, Aljouhar was stumped. He
wrinkled his brow: "What's Tang?"
