Plans for Another Glenn Liftoff Fire Up Cape Canaveral Crowd

Months ahead of John Glenn’s return to space, motels and trailer parks are booked for 100 miles around. High school bands all over Brevard County are thumping out the Marine Hymn. “Go, Glenn, Go” T-shirts are being rushed to Florida from cutting boards in Hong Kong and Honduras.

John Herschel Glenn Jr., middle-named for the 18th-century astronomer who discovered Uranus, is coming back to the low-rent beach resort where he blasted off into history on Feb 20, 1962. He’s due to lift off again on Oct. 29.

His familiar freckle-faced grin beams from every bar, barbershop and barbecue shack, as it has for the last 36 years, along with the six other original Mercury astronauts.

At the Econo Lodge in Cocoa Beach, which Glenn and his fellow human cannonballs owned when it was the Cape Colony Inn, the receptionist answers the phone: “Home of the original seven astronauts. . . . Sorry, we sold out for that week when the flight was announced.”

Tens of thousands of campers are expected to line the beaches of Cape Canaveral and the banks of the Banana River. Thousands more are expected to watch from powerboats and cruise ships out in the Atlantic, where Russian trawlers used to trawl for minnows of Cold War intelligence.

The flaming, frosting Atlas missile that carried Glenn aloft was a mere firecracker compared with the monstrous solid-fuel rockets that will power his next trip.

And Cocoa Beach, then a mosquito coast of shrimp boats, honky-tonk bars and motels, now boasts a modern hospital, a 27-hole golf course and the largest heated pool in Florida.

“We’ve still got a couple of topless clubs out on the highway, but hell’s bells, a laid-back respectability has settled over this rightfully historic community,” asserts Mayor Joe Morgan, now 62, who was a gofer for a defense contractor when Glenn last departed this planet.

His Honor holds forth in his office in the Freedom Seven community center where a lot of seniors younger than Glenn are playing bingo and defending his right to fly again. Like the elementary school, the center is named for America’s first manned spacecraft that ferried Alan Shepard to the Bahamas.

Back in “the first days of Glenn,” the mayor points out, as if citing a biblical epoch, “we had very few people with white or even no hair, because the average age was 29. Now it’s 52 and climbing fast. We were a small town of 6,000, less than half our current population of 12,818.

“We were made up of scientists, engineers, technicians, secretaries, all young. Lots of bartenders and cocktail waitresses. Lots of love affairs and lots of divorces. Only a handful of motels, but lots of drinking spots, some stocking German beer for Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts. The Mouse Trap was the favorite watering spot, where you might catch some astronauts unwinding on the dance floor or playing outrageous pranks on each other.

“Everyone was living on the edge, working 60 to 70 hours a week. It was frantic, exciting, crazy.”

The first astronauts had to be under 40. John Glenn will be 77 when shuttle flight STS-95 lifts off.

As Glenn does his demanding preflight training, children are going through the same procedures that tested the stamina and shook down the ranks of the original Mercury astronauts. In a space camp at the gates of the Kennedy Space Center, they ride the gondola of the giant centrifuge known as “the milkshake.” They shake and quake in the parabolic flight device that Wally Schirra dubbed “the vomit comet.”

Each week 280 boys and girls in grades four through seven climb onto a contraption that gives them a sensation of weightlessness. They experience a shuttle flight’s pull of three Gs on an imaginary trip to Mars, and strap on backpacks to simulate a space walk.

The camp is a feature of the Astronauts Hall of Fame, which the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts sponsor, along with a scholarship foundation, to encourage youngsters interested in science, space technology, even philosophy.

From the earliest days, space exploration had its fun-and-games side. The Mercury astronauts unwound by drag-racing along coastal highway A1A.

Pranks lightened the rugged training and testing. Asked for yet another urine sample, Wally Schirra deposited on nurse Dee O’Hara’s desk a gallon jug of lemonade, stale beer and detergent.

On his first orbit, Glenn reached into his camera bag to capture the orange band of sunset over the Arabian desert and first extracted a toy mouse with a foot-long tail.

Hotelier Henri Landwirth, who housed the astronauts at the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach, took up practical joking under doctor’s orders. “I only had 99 rooms, and I was getting ulcers trying to accommodate all the big shots coming in: congressmen, Air Force generals, corporation presidents, board chairmen. They called me ‘double-up Henri’ because I made them share rooms.”

His doctor told him to find some fun in the job or suffer a nervous breakdown. So he perpetrated a prank a day. “John Glenn asked for more towels, and I had the maid pile hundreds of towels on his bed and in the bureaus and closets.”

On the morning Gordon Cooper blasted into space, Landwirth found a spare spacesuit with Cooper’s name on it in the closet. He put it on and ran through the lobby shouting, “I missed my flight! I missed my flight!”

The astronauts struck back by putting a baby alligator in the pool, and later a 26-foot powerboat.

The sophomoric virus eased the precarious reality of being astronauts. All had witnessed Redstone rockets blow up in flight, topple over on the launching pad, fizzle and pop like champagne corks--and more thunderous failures when the Atlas missile was tested.

On the flight before Glenn’s, Gus Grissom nearly drowned when the hatch blew on his spacecraft at splashdown. Water rushed in, seeping into his spacesuit, which was already weighted with two rolls of souvenir dimes. Glenn’s launch was scrubbed 10 times for weather and technical failures.

“I don’t think there was a pad out there that didn’t have a blowup on it,” recalls Tom O’Malley, the gruff Convair boss who got the troubled Atlas program back on track. “I had a blowout on Pad 11, when she didn’t even lift off. We lost the pad and everything.”

O’Malley pushed the button that launched Glenn into space. That same button is mounted on a plaque in his Cocoa Beach home.

He stunned NASA by asking to meet Glenn face to face before launch day. “If I was going to be responsible for a man’s death, I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him what I was going to do in case we had a catastrophic condition.”

Now 83 and “launching only golf balls,” O’Malley remembers Glenn’s answer word for word: “I don’t want to hear about it. I’ve got all the faith in the world. Just do what you think is right.”

Johnnie Johnson, a former deputy commander of the Kennedy Space Center, stood at Pad 14, just off ICBM Road, where John Glenn leaped to glory. “Not much left here,” he mused. “The gantry was sold for scrap years ago, a victim of Florida cancer: rust.”

An armadillo grazed near the bunker that once stored liquid oxygen, the fuel that boosted the missile aloft. A pile of rubble was all that was left of the pad’s flame deflector. A small conference hall has been created out of the dome-shaped blockhouse where O’Malley pushed the launch button, protected by 14 feet of sand and concrete in case of flameout.

The entrance to the complex is marked by a monument to the Mercury Seven fashioned from some exotic missile metal. Buried beneath it is a time capsule, to be opened in 2462, containing photos, movies, blueprints of the capsule and Glenn’s Marine Corps pilot’s wings.

In the old Mission Control building, tourists ogled the huge wall map that flight controllers and TV audiences studied to track an astronaut’s dash around the world in 88 minutes or so. Rain leaking through the roof fed a puddle in the semicircle of desks. A sign said “No Smoking,” but the desks still had the ashtrays used by Flight Director Chris Kraft and his ground crew when they lit up cigars to celebrate splashdown.

Johnson pointed to the 5-foot-high bank of Burroughs computers along the wall that controlled every phase of Glenn’s flight from launch to recovery. “Combined, they had 30,000 bytes,” Johnson said, “about what’s needed to turn out an expensive wristwatch these days.”

Next, on to Hangar S, where the Mercury astronauts lived just before launch, undergoing final medical tests and donning their spacesuits before boarding a van to the pad. And where they constantly complained about the smell from the cages housing the chimpanzees that preceded them into the heavens.

The hangar now is what Johnson described as a “cleansing area for retrievable space scrap.” One room stores row upon row of helmeted silver spacesuits, like a display in Madame Tussaud’s wax works.

The ghost-town setting of old hangars and decaying gantries was a reminder that the carnival atmosphere of the pioneer space days all but disappeared when flight training and Mission Control moved to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The training is just as rigorous, but the new breed of astronaut is more sedate. Yesteryear’s bawdy barracks behavior would be frowned on nowadays.

The actual launch still takes place at Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center. Glenn’s shuttle, about the size of a DC-9 passenger jet, will depart from Pad 39B, rocketed off by 7.2 million pounds of thrust, compared with the 360,000 pounds of thrust from the Atlas popgun that lofted his phone-booth-sized Mercury capsule 3 1/2 decades ago.

None of the space pioneers, as old-timers down here call themselves, seem surprised at Glenn’s obsession with slipping the surly bonds of Earth one more time.

“Why shouldn’t he go again?” asks Landwirth. “He’s fit and truly believes he can contribute some valuable data on the effects of space on aging.”

Glenn has been “busting to go for years,” says space historian Howard Benedict. “He was grounded because no president would risk losing a national treasure.”

Even though a Russian cosmonaut already had circled Earth 17 times, Glenn’s achievement put America solidly back in the Cold War space race. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Friendship Seven’s success was credited with saving John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

“Let us explore space together,” Kennedy told a proud nation, pledging to put a man on the moon by 1970. Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crew made it with six months to spare.

Glenn became the biggest American hero since Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. His ticker-tape parade through New York rained down 3,700 tons of confetti, a record that still stands.

Glenn addressed a joint session of Congress, never dreaming that a dozen years later he’d be sworn in as the junior senator from Ohio, serve four terms and pile up enough political clout to pester a Democratic president into letting him go back into space.

For John Glenn, who will be 77 on July 18, the heavens can’t wait.

BACKGROUND: As John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, prepares to blast off again at age 77 later this year, a reporter who covered his first journey into space revisits the scene.