WASHINGTON — The television had just reported that Mission Control lost contact with the Columbia astronauts when John Glenn turned to his wife, Annie, and said, “I hope they’re back in a few seconds.”
When they didn’t come back, Glenn’s thoughts turned to what went wrong and how, 41 years ago this month, he risked a similar fate.
“Yes, it could have been me,” Glenn said recently, reflecting on his historic three orbits around the Earth at a time when the nation hungered for good news from space.
Strapped into a 3,000-pound pluglike space capsule with a loose heat shield, Glenn survived the mission of Friendship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962, just as he did combat missions as a fighter pilot during World War II and the Korean War. He lived to tell of his record-setting exploits as a Marine test pilot. And in 1998, the then-77-year-old Glenn flew safely on the shuttle Discovery. The worst that happened to Glenn on that nine-day mission was throwing up.
Shaken by the Columbia tragedy that killed seven astronauts, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration called on Glenn to attend memorial services in Houston and Washington and to meet with families of the victims.
Glenn, the beneficiary of the right stuff, good luck or both, is a living reminder of spaceflight success and a high-profile inspiration of what it can be again.
To Glenn, the rewards of space exploration are worth the risks.
“A lot of people thought it was too dangerous for Columbus to go out straight west. . . . Lewis and Clark would still be in Missouri if they listened to some people,” Glenn said.
Trim and vibrant at 81, Glenn shows few of the facial tributaries of old age. He weighs 186 pounds, 15 pounds more than when he first orbited the Earth in 1962.
Glenn retired from politics in 1998, after serving 24 years in the Senate. He lives with Annie, his wife of 59 years, in suburban Washington.
“Back in the early days [of the space race], it was almost akin to going into combat, because of the Cold War,” he said.
Stuffed into a “human holster,” as Tom Wolfe described Friendship 7 in his book The Right Stuff, Glenn watched the flames deflect off the tiny capsule’s heat shield as he re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. The shield was loose and in danger of falling off.
“A real fireball outside,” is how Glenn, watching through Friendship 7’s window, described his trip through re-entry, according to a NASA transcript of the flight. Glenn rocked, thumped and bounced his way through the atmosphere. Finally, the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, about 800 miles southeast of Bermuda.
Glenn wasn’t told by Mission Control about the heat-shield problem, “but I could figure it out. I wasn’t stupid,” he said. “Were we taking more risks in those days? I don’t know.”
