A Hero Gets Back to Business

By GERALDINE BAUM

June 2, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

The critics started jawing right away. Why was NASA giving John Glenn a second ride in space come October?

Privately, a lot of scientists who study the elderly complained that the medical rationale was a sham, that big breakthroughs rarely come from experiments on one human--never mind that biology done in space is questionable.

Some historians suggested that the space agency was returning to a pre-Challenger notion of shuttle flights--as spectacle and entertainment.

Then there were the true cynics. In the nation’s capital, entire busloads of them speculate and dissect and then conclude that whatever is done, should have been done differently. In this case, they suspected that the Democratic senator from Ohio had strong-armed a joy ride out of the Clinton administration as payback for being a fierce partisan at campaign fund-raising hearings last summer.

Altogether, Glenn’s flight was looking like another case of when the official story--that science alone was responsible for returning Glenn to space--might not be the real one.

But some fictions are valuable to sustain, and one of them just might be that it is critical to science--and perhaps all of humanity--that John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, be allowed to relive the greatest moment of his life.

Even NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin--to whom Glenn sold himself as an airborne guinea pig who would demonstrate the effects of space travel on the elderly--seemed to understand what this was really about.

“Is it just science?” Goldin has asked. “No. Inspiration is part of the American psyche.”

America just might be rich enough to give one of its genuine heroes the second space ride he never got--and, in the process, give the country a morale boost as important as any piece of geriatric science Glenn might pick up.

Conquest Fever Sweeps the Country

In a recent interview, Glenn--who will be 77 next month--resisted the romance of his own story--a tale of an old guy who gets a last dance with a long-ago love.

“Am I interested in this on a personal basis?” asks Glenn, still very much the fighter-jock test pilot of few words portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.”

“Well, of course I am.

“We’ll have one of the highest orbits that anybody has had in space. That’s a nice little side thing. But what you’re up there for is to accomplish something for the country that may break us into some new areas of research that may benefit an awful lot of people.”

Glenn is talking science, but a lot of Americans are swept up in this tale of a victory lap. This is a country, after all, where people flock to high school reunions and redo wedding vows after 50 years. So why not let one of America’s original seven astronauts suit up one last time?

Thousands of letters to that effect have poured into Glenn’s Senate office and NASA headquarters since the 10-day shuttle mission was announced in January. The overwhelming media response has forced NASA officials in Houston to use an 800-seat auditorium for press briefings instead of the 60-seat facility used for most shuttle missions. And anticipation is over the top. Already, it’s impossible to get a hotel room in Cocoa Beach, Fla., for Oct. 29, the targeted launch date for “STS 95,” the mission’s official name.

Even NASA’s most veteran employees, who have seen dozens of shuttle launches, are awed by the man who would become the oldest human to fly in space.

“It’s sometimes hard to get him from one training mission to the next because so many employees on the ground stop him to shake his hand or get an autograph,” says Doug Ward, a top NASA official.

The elderly--America has 35 million people over age 65--are particularly charged up. (Glenn will be 16 years older than the previous oldest astronauts.) A 76-year-old Tiberon woman, who learned to fly a helicopter when she was 73, wrote the senator: ‘I’m so glad you can go up again. Go! Go!”

Ex-Astronaut Works Age to His Advantage

In Glenn’s youth, the red-haired Marine furthered the American tradition of exploring faraway expanses.

In his old age, Glenn is promoting a more personal realization: that human beings continue to be worthy, interesting and capable as they grow old.

“At the very least, the trip demonstrates that there’s no reason you should not go into space because you’re 70,” says Tuck Finch, a professor at USC’s School of Gerontology.

NASA’s Dr. John Charles, who is overseeing the 13 experiments Glenn will conduct aboard the shuttle, acknowledges that they’re “not going to cure cancer.” The idea is to see how Glenn, of aging body and mind, compares with younger astronauts. Charles says NASA regularly does experiments with few subjects.

“It’s like Christmas morning,” Charles says. “You never know what you’re going to get when you do research. . . . You let the data build. If we fly someone old in space once, maybe we’ll do it again.”

And for researchers who want to know why both space travel and aging cause muscle loss and sleeplessness, Glenn is perhaps the perfect specimen. Because he has taken the NASA physical every year since he joined the space program in 1953, the agency has 45 years of his medical records.

Glenn apparently had his own reasons for taking those annual checkups.

Asked when the idea of returning to space first came into his head, Glenn, without missing a beat, says: “1962.”

And then he laughs.

“I wanted to go back up as soon as I got down,” he says. “You’re on the cutting edge of science. That’s fascinating to me. I always thought that if ever there was an ‘opportunity’ I would do it. But I never thought age would become an advantage instead of a disadvantage.”

Glenn angled to go back after his historic Feb. 20, 1962, Mercury capsule flight, but President Kennedy, who worried about Glenn’s safety and who had his own political plans for the space hero, stopped him.

But nothing could diminish Glenn’s yearning. He particularly ached to fly a later-day spacecraft to the moon, he says.

“John has been a creature of the air his whole life,” says Julian Scheer, a former reporter and NASA spokesman who covered Glenn’s first flight. “He has never stopped flying. All his time in the Senate, he has flown home to Ohio and back to Washington in his own twin-engine. He is most at home in the air.”

When he ran into Glenn at a Cape Canaveral, Fla., ceremony a few years ago, Scheer said he sensed “that John would not be content until he went up there again.”

But there wasn’t going to be an “opportunity.” Glenn had to make it happen.

Three years ago, with his Senate career apparently approaching a logical conclusion, Glenn launched his campaign to return to space. After reading a chart in a book by two NASA doctors comparing the influence of space travel and aging on the human body, he began talking about the topic to other physicians.

On June 18, 1996, Glenn walked into Goldin’s office accompanied by the Senate physician, and pitched the idea that “somebody ought to be looking into this.”

For 18 months, Glenn made the case that the “somebody” ought to be him. He called the NASA chief at least 50 times, says Goldin, who refers to the senator as “the most tenacious person I’ve encountered in my lifetime.”

Exceptions Made for Exceptional Candidate

Goldin established two criteria: Glenn had to be physically fit, and the science had to be valid and peer-reviewed. But Glenn was ahead of him.

Before ever going to see Goldin, Glenn had asked his doctors to put him through a physical “like the new guys coming in to be astronauts.” The rigorous exam proved that he still had the right stuff.

Clearly, exceptions were made, rules were bent, the norms for mission-specialists were thrown out. But, just as clearly, Glenn wasn’t an ordinary applicant.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry says President Clinton was careful not to “lift a finger to make it happen,” to avoid the appearance that he was rewarding Glenn for his support in campaign fund-raising hearings.

“There’s no way you could ever buy John Glenn. He is the most delightful and dignified person on the face of the Earth,” says McCurry, who worked on the senator’s failed presidential bid in 1984.

Almost 40 years after Glenn orbited the Earth three times in the relatively tiny, bell-shaped Friendship 7 capsule, it’s hard to understand the adulation he inspired. But in just four hours and 56 minutes he brought America back from the brink of what one politician called “national extinction.”

The Russians had put two men in orbit and some feared they were winning the Cold War race in science and technology. When Glenn splashed back to Earth, he restored his country’s honor. This drama was intensified because in true American-hero style, he overcame serious obstacles. When stabilizers failed in mid-flight, he flew the craft manually. After a faulty mechanism erroneously signaled that the capsule’s heat shields might come loose, he never flinched--even though he was aware he might burn up in 3,000-degree heat upon reentry.

Back on Earth, Glenn was greeted by Kennedy; 4 million New Yorkers showered him and his family with ticker tape; the New York Times called him “America’s first flesh-and-blood Buck Rogers.”

Having orbited the planet at age 40, this son of a plumber was christened a national hero, a prince in the era of Camelot. A celebrity of incomprehensible proportions, Glenn’s fame propelled him into another career.

He had been interested in government and politics long before he became a pilot. According to a biographer, Frank Van Riper, when other kids in high school were writing papers on their favorite sports heroes, Glenn was penning a civics paper on the workings of the Senate. Van Riper wrote that after Glenn was elevated to a “god-man status enjoyed only by Charles Lindbergh,” his interest in politics came alive.

But it wasn’t until he was 53--after three failed attempts taught him some basic lessons about politics--that he finally was elected to the U.S. Senate. “Of all the first astronauts, Glenn was the only one known for his winning personality and the political ambition to go with it,” Scheer says. “He had the big grin and fresh face. He was from a small town, went to a small college and married his childhood sweetheart and had two children--a boy and girl. My God, Frank Capra would have cast this movie himself and the people would have said, ‘Frank, it’s too perfect. Shouldn’t the wife be ugly or the kids be crippled? We need conflict here.’

“But the interesting thing is that image has never really been tarnished,” Scheer adds. “That’s the way he lived his life--what you saw was what you got.”

Wherever He Went, He Always Went Far

The Senate turned out to be his fourth career. In each career he tried to go as far as he could: After growing up in New Concord, Ohio, a town of 2,000, and graduating from a local college, he was a highly decorated Marine combat pilot, flying 149 missions in World War II and the Korean War. He then became a military test pilot, breaking a transcontinental speed record in 1957 for the first supersonic flight from Los Angeles to New York. Later, he entered the space program.

Yet life wasn’t perfect. Glenn endured the assassinations of his two political inspirations, the Kennedy brothers; he had become a close enough family friend that it was left to him to tell Robert F. Kennedy’s children of their father’s death.

And there were other blows: His keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention bombed; he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1984 and racked up $3 million in debt that wasn’t settled until recently; he was accused--then exonerated--of using his clout to keep federal regulators out of the way of savings-and-loan mogul Charles H. Keating Jr.

As the legendary spaceman-turned-politician walked into the waiting room of his Senate office the other day, his face revealed the decades that have passed since the peak of his fame: The freckles are faded; the red hair is now white; the green eyes seem sunken into crinkles. But in his gray suit and striped tie, he is still upright, lean, a no-nonsense presence.

Now, when he talks about his 24 years in the Senate, Glenn highlights his leadership on nuclear nonproliferation and streamlining government procedures. He concedes that a lot of his record makes people’s “eyes glaze over.”

“Some of the things I’m most proud of got the least attention,” he says.

He’ll leave Washington at the end of the year with few close friends in the club that is the Senate, political insiders agree, but with a reputation of being one of the best senators to ever serve his state.

Preparation, Training Never-Ending Process

Since NASA welcomed him back, Glenn has devoted every spare moment to preparing for his trip. Aides say he spends his evenings with manuals--he’ll take 60 pounds of books with him into space--spread around him in his living room. During Senate breaks and long weekends, he has gone to Houston or Cape Canaveral for training. Sometimes, he flies his own plane with his co-pilot and wife, Annie Glenn.

She initially resisted the adventure. But he worked on her, too.

“She saw more danger in it than I did,” Glenn says. “But I kept talking about it and about the frailties of old age and if we had a chance to alleviate that by this flight. . . . Well, she came around.”

Annie Glenn, who met her husband when she was 4 and he was 3, has been so much a part of his training that members of the crew reportedly have joked that if Glenn couldn’t make it, she’d be qualified to go.

Glenn’s training for his 212 hours in space has ranged from the most basic--learning to eat or to use the latrine--to the incredibly complex--understanding the mechanics of the shuttle craft. He’s had geography lessons to help him identify the places on Earth he’ll be photographing to help researchers understand the effects of El Nino.

He has completed most of the physical training for potential disasters: landing in a pool and swimming out from under a parachute; scaling down the side of the shuttle. His two 9-minute spins in a centrifuge at as much as three times the force of gravity weren’t too bad--compared with the 16Gs spin he got during training 36 years ago. “Nobody would want to experience that again,” he says.

A large part of his training has focused on the many less-than glamorous tasks he’ll perform as the junior member of the seven-person crew: collecting samples of his and other astronauts’ urine and blood, labeling them with bar codes, using a laptop computer for the first time. He practiced sleeping with brain-wave monitors hooked up to his head and sensors and other wires affixed to his face.

Training Sessions Spur Rejuvenation

When he first entered the space program, there were about 35 people--and “that included astronauts, engineers, secretaries and janitors,” he says. Now there are nearly 10,000.

Glenn’s Senate aides say he returns from training weekends charged up and bubbling with enthusiasm in a way they have not seen in years.

Indeed, he seems reborn to a past life, although he has never wanted to be known as the astronaut in the Senate.

And while he may never find true immortality in the halls of the Capitol, he may find it again in the stars.

“I can’t say I’ve ever had a dream about space or that I ponder it all the time,” he says. “But in the last 36 years, there’s been a rare day that somebody did not mention something about the space program to me. I’ve recalled it so often, it has remained very vivid in my memory. It’s exciting to think I’ll be there again. Very exciting.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Spaceman John Glenn: Then and Now

1962

LAUNCH DATE: Feb. 20

AGE: 40

FAMILY: Wife, Annie Castor Glenn; two children, ages 14 and 16

TITLE: Lieutenant Colonel

HEIGHT: 5’10.5”

WEIGHT: 168 pounds

SALARY: $13,796/year

EXERCISE: Running 2 miles/day

SPACECRAFT: Friendship 7