John Glenn Dreams of Space 35 Years After Historic Orbit

“Look at this,” says the former astronaut, swiveling to his desktop computer. “Did you know they have flights scheduled through out to 2003?”

John Glenn, one of the most famous faces in space, is navigating in cyberspace, demonstrating how if he directs the little arrow just so, it will be in the perfect position to fetch the long-range space shuttle schedule.

There are two official John Glenn pages on the Internet, but Glenn’s browser is permanently pointed at NASA.

The 75-year-old senator from Ohio has joked for years about being the perfect choice for a geriatric study in space. But now, scanning the NASA page on the World Wide Web, Glenn waxes serious.

On the shuttle’s list of orbiters, launch dates and missions, Glenn points out the ones marked “SpaceHab-DM.”

“For those, they put in a cargo bay,” he explains, which means there’s space for an extra passenger.

If there’s ever room for Glenn on a space shuttle, it would be on a craft outfitted with the space habitat, he says, adding, “I’m ready when they say go.”

NASA and the National Institutes of Health have talked about using the shuttle to study the effect of microgravity on “older organisms.” But that doesn’t mean they’ll take the first American to orbit the Earth up on his offer to be the first septuagenarian in space.

Two lawmakers once got rides on the shuttle. But that was before the 1986 Challenger explosion that claimed the life of schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and six other astronauts.

Since then, the civilians aboard shuttles have tended to be medical doctors or PhDs familiar with the experiments at hand.

In other words, what matters most is not “the right stuff” but the right academics.

That’s a world of change since NASA sought the agile minds and steely guts of experienced test pilots in the early days of the space program. Glenn, a Marine pilot, was one of the original Mercury Seven.

At the National Air and Space Museum, where he agreed to pose for photos, Glenn spotted a little boy inching into camera range.

He turned away from the professional photographers and toward the snapshot-takers. Within moments, every school group in the building seemed to converge with outstretched tablets and souvenir space books.

“I want to shake his hand,” says British tourist Kevin Sharpe, 37, eyeing the tight quarters of Glenn’s capsule. “Look how small that is. What a brave man he must have been.”

Three and a half decades have passed since Glenn felt the jolt of the mighty Atlas rocket and proved that humans could survive in weightlessness without loss of vision, coordination or breakfast (nausea was one of the predicted side effects.)

On Feb. 20, 1962, watching the world from the distance of 160 miles, Glenn exclaimed, “Oh, that view is tremendous.”

Sitting in his Senate office, Glenn still conveys that excitement.

He grabs a large book that’s obviously been opened to the same spot many times. It falls open to a grainy color photograph--one of the first from space--and Glenn talks of wonders he saw through the viewfinder:

“There were big dust storms in North Africa and along the Atlantic coast. Gibraltar would be about right here.”

He grows quiet only when told that it’s been 35 years since his flight, the same number of years that elapsed between his history-making day and the then-incredible Atlantic crossing by aviator Charles Lindbergh in the “Spirit of St. Louis.”

“My gosh,” he says. “Is that right?”

“Think of all the progress we have made. . . . It’s almost miraculous,” he says.

“My dad was born [in 1895] eight years before the Wright brothers flew . . . and he lived to see me make space flight,” Glenn said. “My dad literally went from horse and buggy days to seeing space flight.”

Glenn wonders whether people still remember the reason for all the fuss, and why it was such a big deal to be the third human--but first American--in orbit.

“People tend to forget that this was the Cold War at its coldest,” he says. The Russians had put men up twice while the Americans were conducting unmanned tests and suborbital missions.

“They were outdoing the United States of America in technology. That was unbelievable to most Americans,” he says. “We knew that they would use this thing in propaganda around the world to show that communism was superior to everything else.

“It wasn’t just a science race; it was a race for the hearts and minds of people,” says Glenn. “America really felt threatened.”

That “explains the response, then, to my flight.”

The response was huge: New York City threw its biggest ticker-tape parade; 4 million people turned out. Another 250,000 watched the Mercury Seven parade in the rain from the White House to the Capitol, where Glenn addressed a joint session of Congress.

Glenn lost count of the number of schools and streets named after him.

Each day’s mail still carries requests for autographs.

Some are from children, but most are from grown-ups who remember wrapping themselves in foil to play at being astronauts, or who recall classes coming to a halt to watch the launch on television, their young memories forever imprinted with M. Scott Carpenter’s spine-chilling countdown: “Eight, seven, six. God speed John Glenn. Three, two, one, ignition.”

“John Glenn’s flight really did give Americans the chance to feel good about themselves,” said Tom Crouch, chairman of the National Air and Space Museum’s department of aeronautics. “In the Golden Age of the space program, that flight stands out, along with Apollo 8 [the first lunar orbit, in 1968] and Apollo 11 [the first lunar landing, in 1969].”

Glenn, orbiting NASA’s home page, still dreams of space.

“I’m not ready to declare a place in history,” he says. “I’m still going. I’ll declare a place in history whenever I’m done with what I’m doing.”