Enthralled Millions 25 Years Ago : The Day John Glenn Orbited Into History

Suddenly, John Glenn is 65.

Somehow a quarter of a century has swept past since the morning he orbited the Earth, and wrote his name large in the history of America.

Twenty-five years ago this morning, his scratchy radio transmissions from the bell-shaped spacecraft Friendship 7 had millions of rapt listeners as he hurtled around the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h.

Today, Glenn is twice a grandfather, several times a millionaire, and a third-term United States senator who--with the help of voters four years ago--overcame his aspirations to be President.

But to much of the civilized world he is still a grown-up Tom Sawyer in a silver pressure suit.

Even though two Americans flew to the fringe of space before him and two Russians orbited the Earth while he prepared, it is still the name John Glenn that most compellingly summons the images of man’s first bold strides into the Space Age.

Morning of Launch

On the morning he was launched into space in a capsule the size of a telephone booth, America stopped moving.

For 30 minutes, the phones quit ringing in police headquarters in Chicago. In Grand Central Station in New York, thousands of commuters froze in their tracks, riveted to a huge television screen showing his thunderous ascent from Cape Canaveral. At the White House, President John F. Kennedy interrupted breakfast with Democratic congressional leaders; they gathered around a television set, joining an audience of 100 million viewers.

At 9:47 a.m., the engines of the Atlas booster beneath Glenn poured a torrent of flame onto the launch pad and shock waves reverberated across the Florida marsh. The space vehicle moved slowly upward, shedding frost from the skin of its chilled oxygen tank.

The first words as it lifted from the pad came from astronaut Scott Carpenter in the control center five miles away: “Godspeed, John Glenn.”

‘I Get a Tingling’

“To this day,” Glenn said earlier this week, “I get a tingling and the hair stands up on my neck every time I hear that.”

Five hours after the heart-pounding launch, much of the civilized world still watched and listened as Glenn plunged down from space with flight controllers in Florida still uncertain whether America’s finest moment in the new age was about to end in unspeakable tragedy. A faulty warning light had indicated--erroneously, as it turned out--that the heat shield designed to protect his space capsule during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere had come loose in flight. Had that been the case, the capsule would have been destroyed--and Glenn along with it.

“To say the least, it was a traumatic moment,” Kenneth Kleinknecht, who was director of the Mercury Project Office, recalled last week. “For a time, we really didn’t know for certain whether he was up there to stay or whether he was coming home.”

From the perspective of 25 years, haunting similarities can be seen in the circumstances surrounding Glenn’s flight and the January, 1986, Challenger mission that ended in disaster. In both cases, there were concerns about the weather, pressures to launch and questions of whether technology was being pushed too far too fast, of whether astronauts knew enough, of whether engineers and technicians on the ground were overworked.

Tonight hundreds of the technicians, engineers and officials involved in Glenn’s historic three-orbit flight, perhaps joined by President Reagan, will get together in Washington for the biggest reunion since they started the U.S. manned exploration of space.

The $150-a-plate dinner is sold out and is expected to raise as much as $120,000 for a scholarship fund set up by Glenn and the other five surviving Mercury astronauts, along with the widow of Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom, who was killed in a 1967 Apollo spacecraft fire.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had hoped to launch Glenn in December, 1961. The Russians had again embarrassed the United States, by launching Yuri A. Gagarin for a one-orbit flight around the Earth in April and Gherman S. Titov for 17 orbits in August. The United States had launched Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Grissom on brief suborbital trips down the Atlantic missile range and had been chagrined when Grissom’s spacecraft sank before it could be lifted from the ocean.

NASA never came close to a December launch. January brought a string of technical delays and postponements because of unacceptable weather.

On Jan. 27, Glenn climbed into the Friendship 7 and waited five hours, coming within 20 minutes of liftoff before another weather-related postponement was ordered--although Tass, the Soviet news agency, attributed the delay to NASA’s fear of failure.

The repeated delays, often the result of sea conditions in the recovery area in the Atlantic, were worst for the flight control team, which had to go to work at about 10 o’clock the night before the launch.

“So everyone would go to bed about 2 o’clock in the afternoon,” Roberts said. “Then would come the word at 8 or 9 o’clock of another postponement. At that point you’d already had your night’s sleep.”

Returned to Virginia

During one extended delay, members of the flight control team went home to the Manned Spacecraft Center, then at Langley, Va.

“We had no sooner gotten our clothes washed when Chris Craft called and said we had to go back that day,” recalled Tecwyn Roberts, who was the flight dynamics officer for the mission. “There was a big snow on the ground in Virginia, and so we had to take a train and ride all night back to Florida.”

For their part, flight crew teams took to furious morning volleyball games to wear themselves out so that they could fall asleep in the afternoon.

Through January and February, Glenn lived in seclusion in a hangar on the Cape, emerging only to get regular haircuts so that his tight space helmet would fit properly, or to go to church. In both cases, he was trailed by hordes of reporters. “I led more Catholics into the Presbyterian Church than anybody in history,” he said recently.

One evening in January, a distraught young husband walked into the bar of the Starlite Motel across the hallway from the NASA pressroom, pulled out a gun and shot his wife dead as she worked behind the bar.

With Glenn temporarily forgotten, the press covered the manhunt across central Florida, and a British correspondent reported with satisfaction: “At last someone got a shot off.”

More Delays

But the delays dragged on. Members of Congress shuttled back and forth between Washington and Florida. Rep. James Fulton (D-Pa.), a senior member of the House space committee, grew irritated by all of the postponements. The Mercury spacecraft and its launch vehicle, he said, reminded him of “some Rube Goldberg device on top of a plumber’s nightmare.”

A New York physician, doubting NASA’s portrayal of Glenn as a model of serenity, suggested the time had come to take him off the flight. The astronaut’s anxiety level, he declared, was reaching the point that he might be seized by a compulsion to return to Earth the moment he reached orbit.

It was a moment of high confidence in technology. As Glenn prepared for flight, the Army’s new Nike Zeus anti-missile missile intercepted a Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missile over White Sands, N.M.

Scientists pressed ahead with plans for Project Mohole, a scheme to drill a hole all the way through the crust of the earth to the mantle.

NASA released the first drawings of the Apollo spacecraft being designed to carry out Kennedy’s mandate for a mission to the moon within the decade.

Inside Project Mercury, however, there was an acute awareness of the hazards of manned space flight.

Retired astronaut Donald K. Slayton, the Atlas missile expert on the Mercury team, recalled: “I had spent a lot of time watching Atlases blow up, and at the time of the flight I figured the odds of John’s failing at about one in five.”

They called the rocket the “steel balloon” because it was so thin it could not even support its own weight. When it was hauled cross country, an attendant rode on the trailer with it to ensure that it remained pressurized and did not collapse.

Stresses on Rocket

Atlas failures usually came around 35,000 feet, when a combination of speed and atmospheric pressure subjected the rocket to its most punishing stresses. Glenn recalls the seven astronauts’ watching an unmanned Atlas launch at night at Cape Canaveral:

“They took us out to a camera pad and fixed it all up where we could hear the countdown. They were going to demonstrate it to all us big hairy astronauts.

“It lifted off and the sound came pounding us in the chest and it rose upon a beautiful clear night, and we were going, ‘Oh God, go.’ And then that thing hit about 35,000 feet and blew. It looked like an atomic bomb right over our heads, and we all stood there and looked at each other and said ‘Sheeeiiiiit!’ Back to the drawing board.”

Glenn went into Project Mercury believing that one of the Mercury Seven would die before it was over. Before his flight, he talked frankly with his two teen-aged children about the possibility that he would be killed.

America’s first space tragedy did not come, however, until six years later when Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee were killed while training for the first Apollo flight to the moon.

Before dawn on the morning of launch, Glenn walked out of his crew quarters, carrying an air conditioner that kept him comfortable inside his triple-layered, 20-pound spacesuit by blowing air over ice cubes. He had been up since 2:20 a.m.

As his entourage rode the elevator up the side of the Atlas booster and crossed the catwalk to the hatch of Friendship 7, it looked like another day for a scrub. First light in the east showed clouds all across the Florida coast.

Technicians from McDonnell Aircraft Corp., builder of the Mercury capsule, removed a control panel from above Glenn’s form-fitting couch to give him enough room to squeeze in feet first.

As they tightened the 70 bolts to close the hatch, one broke. Another 40-minute delay.

Lying on his back, scarcely able to move, Glenn went through the final checkout of his spacecraft. He exercised with a bungee cord to fight off stiffness, and talked by telephone with his wife and children in Virginia. “I think I’ll go down to the store and buy some gum,” he said, using a phrase he had often used when leaving the family for military assignments in the Marine Corps.

Three-Hour Wait

By the time officials decided conditions were clear for a launch, Glenn had been in the capsule for more than three hours. More than 50,000 people had appeared on the nearby beaches to watch.

Around the world a force of 18,000 was at tracking stations and aboard two dozen ships at sea and 60 airplanes aloft. (The captain of one aircraft carrier in the Atlantic had disarmed a photographer who came aboard ship with a gun, believing that the astronaut recovery mission was merely a cover for an invasion of Cuba.)

The countdown moved toward the last 10 seconds, and the radio circuits fell silent.

From Mercury control, the voice of B. G. McNabb: “May the good Lord ride all the way.” And from Tom O’Malley of Convair, “May the wee ones ride with ye, Johnny.”

“Ten, nine, eight, seven . . “ There was a jolt, the roar of a thousand Niagaras, and a cloud of steam and flame ricocheting from the concrete launch pad. Movement.

Mercury Control: “Liftoff.”

Glenn: “Liftoff; the clock is operating. We’re under way.”

Scott Carpenter: “Godspeed, John Glenn.”

As Eugene Kranz, now director of mission operations at the Johnson Space Center, remembers it, the Teletype message that sent a chill through mission control said: “Segment 51. Heat shield deploy indicating on.”

Near the end of the first orbit, a telemetry signal from the spacecraft indicated that its heat shield had moved into position for landing. If true, John Glenn stood to die in a 3,000-degree fireball as Friendship 7 cut through the atmosphere on the way back to Earth.

Since mission control could talk with Glenn only when he was passing over the United States, communication with the other stations around the globe was by Teletype.

Kranz had fortunately taken a course in speed printing.

For the next three hours, he furiously printed instructions on government forms and rushed them to two Teletype operators who sent them along to tracking stations for relay to the astronaut.

It was not until Glenn was preparing to re-enter at the end of the third orbit that mission control told him directly of its concern, but by then Glenn had figured it out for himself.

Signal Believed Erroneous

In Florida, officials had become convinced the heat shield was not in fact deployed, that the signal was erroneous. In any case, the only course open to Glenn was to fire the retro rockets kicking him out of orbit on schedule. But instead of discarding the expended retro rocket package, he was told to keep it in place in the hope that it would hold the heat shield in position, if in fact it was loose.

The concern was that carrying the rocket pack down might cause a shock wave that would burn a hole through the heat shield, or that the control thrusters might not be able to prevent an unstable spacecraft from re-entering sideways.

Down he came, the retro rocket motors vaporizing in the 17,000-m.p.h. encounter with the atmosphere, the capsule yawing from side to side.

For a moment, Glenn feared it might turn over and re-enter top first, with the heat shield offering no protection. Before the stabilizing drogue parachute popped out, the fuel ran out in both his manual and automatic control systems, but by then it didn’t matter--he was falling like a cannonball.

“After I was way down in the atmosphere and falling,” Glenn recalled this week, “I was getting sensation like that thing was really about to do something drastic. If it had really gone over, and the chute had come out, then I would have been in deep trouble. I was a little antsy about getting the drogue chute out. I was getting too much motion, and I was reaching to pull the handle to bring it out manually when it came out.”

Main Parachutes Unfurled

At 10,000 feet, with Friendship 7 going straight down at 600 m.p.h., the main parachutes unfurled.

Seventeen minutes after the spacecraft hit the water, Friendship 7 was fished out by the destroyer Noa, which had watched the splashdown from a distance of six miles.

Rather than climbing laboriously out the neck of the spacecraft, Glenn blew the hatch off with explosive bolts, and stepped onto the deck.

Said America’s first space traveler upon his return to Earth: “It was hot in there.”

Because he was 40, Glenn’s chances of ever walking on the moon were poor to none. He quit the space program, and was inevitably drawn into politics, a Kennedy Democrat.

A fall in a bathtub in 1964 ended his first try for the Senate, and a Democratic primary upset ended the second six years later. It was not until 1974 that the persistent Glenn won a Senate seat from Ohio.

In 1976, he was still a national hero and a top contender to join Jimmy Carter on the Democratic ticket, but his speech to the Democratic National Convention fell flat and ended his chances.

He was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1984. But time after time, the crowds cheered the astronaut who walked onto the platform more loudly than the candidate who walked off. Still, he refused all efforts by handlers to change his style and make himself more glib and more humorous.

Last year, winning election to his third term in the Senate and with the presidential monkey off his back, he was at last seemingly comfortable as a politician.

Free-wheeling, aggressive, he began to bring Democrats to their feet with zingers at Ronald Reagan and the religious New Right. “I have been an elder in the Presbyterian Church for 25 years,” he told Democratic partisans. “And I believe the last thing this country needs is to have the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John rewritten by Meese, Helms, Reagan and Falwell.”

“He is still approaching his zenith,” said Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.). “He doesn’t look for headlines, and he doesn’t look for notoriety. He locks onto things and he stays with them until he sees them through.

“He was hurt by the presidential thing, but he never blamed anybody but himself.

“I look at the guy and sometimes I can’t help but envy him.”