JOHN GLENN, AMERICA'S FIRST SPACE HERO published in Lebanon newspaper 12/14/16

Another American hero has passed.  If you are in my age range, you probably feel like you grew up with our space program.  I’m not a soap opera fan but I remember a show called The Days of Our Lives and every time I read a news story about NASA and our astronauts, I think of how all the space events really were special days in our lives and how we remember where we were when those events happened.

I was in Lebanon Junior High when every class had a discussion on October 5, 1957 as we first learned about Sputnik and I remember the day vividly, and the emotions expressed, especially by students much more interested in science than I was.  

We were eating dinner at Munger Moss Restaurant the night of January 27, 1967, and the restaurant was unusually quiet and the atmosphere was solemn as we had all just heard about the fire aboard Apollo 1 which killed Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chafee

I was on the road on my way to my Senate confirmation hearing in Jefferson City on January 28, 1986 when I heard the news bulletin on the radio about the fiery explosion of the Challenger which killed  five of our astronauts, including school teacher, Christa McAuliffe, and two payload specialists.  Who can forget listening to President Ronald Reagan later that evening as he gave the hauntingly beautiful eulogy written for him by speechwriter Peggy Noonan, “We will never forget  them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

It was a happier time in 1969 when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon.  I was just four months away from giving birth to my daughter and I was watching it all on television. It  was so exciting to think how one day I could tell her she was born the same year as Americans first walked on the moon.

For some reason I do not remember the exact details of John Glenn becoming the first man to orbit the earth in February 1962 and return home safely aboard  the Mercury capsule Friendship 7.  But I was awake last week during the night  following his death and heard him on C-Span giving a speech from several years ago about that experience. I do not recall the frightening moments aboard the space capsule as re-told by Mark Davis last Friday on one of my favorite news websites.

Mark Davis is a columnist and a talk show host, and also the son of one of the Air Force personnel specialists who helped whittle down the original 500 candidates who hoped to be the first man to orbit the earth from which John Glenn was chosen.  So Davis has a unique perspective and understanding of what happened that day as it was told to him by his father.  He was only four years old when Glenn orbited the earth so he has no personal memory of the flight, but he writes that he has watched the film of the Atlas booster rising into the Florida skies “a thousand times”.

I am quoting from his column which he wrote last week.

“When the time came to fire the engines to slow his orbit, a sensor indicated that the heat shield at the broad end of his capsule was loose.  If it failed to stay attached, Glenn would burn up in the fireball  of re-entry through the  atmosphere.  It appeared the only things keeping the shield in place were the straps holding the small engines that fired to slow the capsule’s orbit.

The decision was made to keep that engine pack attached rather than jettison it as planned.  As a result, Glenn’s 17,000 mph streak back toward Earth was even more noisy and fiery that it would have already been.  He did not know whether he was seeing the expected disintegration of the rocket pack, or in fact the failure of the heat shield that was his only hope to survive.

Until the Friendship 7 capsule emerged from the flaming streak of its re-entry path, deploying its parachutes over the South Atlantic, no one on Earth knew that Glenn had survived.  As he and his spacecraft were hoisted aboard the destroyer USS NOA, a combination of relief and pride washed across America.”

Davis continues:  “The decisions John Glenn made during his near-century of life help shape a story of American heroism unlike any other.  He decided to enlist in the military after Pearl Harbor.  He decided to move from the Navy to the Marines to pursue aviation.  After flying just under sixty combat missions in WW2 and just over sixty in the Korean War, he decided to seek an appointment to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River in Maryland, a path that would lead to Project Mercury and into space.”

Now here is a fact that will blow your mind if you have never thought about it before.  John Glenn was born less than 20 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight!  And he lived to see mankind make specific plans to walk on the surface of Mars.  It makes you wonder what will happen in the next 100 years.