40 Years Later, Astronaut Glenn Phones It In

Two spacewalking astronauts successfully checked out a little-used portal at the international space station on Wednesday and got a call of congratulations from John Glenn.

“I’m envious at what you’re doing up there,” said Glenn, celebrating his 40th anniversary as the first American in orbit.

“I never got to do a spacewalk. But I’ve joked and I said that NASA wouldn’t let me do that because they were afraid at my age on that last flight in ’98 that I might wander off someplace.”

Glenn, 80, orbited the Earth on Feb. 20, 1962, and 36 years later rode aboard a shuttle to became the oldest person to fly in space.

On board the space station, astronauts Carl Walz and Daniel Bursch emerged early from the American-made Quest air lock and quickly completed advance work for the next assembly mission, in April. They hooked up electrical cables and gathered tools to be used by others on that shuttle flight.

The Quest air lock was installed last summer and experienced minor problems at the time. It had not been used since.

The spacewalk, at nearly six hours, lasted longer than Glenn’s four-hour, 55-minute flight aboard Friendship 7.

“We probably had almost as much room in our spacesuit today as you had in the Mercury,” Bursch told Glenn. “Some things never change. We also have a lot of medical tests that we have to do tomorrow, much like you did after your flight, both flights.”

Both spacewalkers wore new radiation-monitoring badges to measure the dosage to their eyes, internal organs and skin. Cosmic radiation outside a shielded spaceship can cause cancer, cataracts or nerve damage.

Walz, Bursch and their Russian commander, Yuri Onufrienko, are almost halfway through their nearly six-month mission.