Remembering John Glenn

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That the death of John Glenn on Thursday came as no surprise made it no less sad. For my generation, Glenn was an indelible figure of towering accomplishment. Given his chosen profession and the risks that defined it, living to the age of 95 was itself a feat, never mind being launched into space twice. His death irretrievably closes the door on an era: He was the last living astronaut of the original Mercury Seven.

As I was reviewing our news brief on Glenn’s passing, it occurred to me that his stature in American life probably has generational resonance. Glenn looms larger than life in my consciousness of aviation history in a way that he is less likely to for someone born around, or after, the time he went into space in 1962. It helps to have lived through the events that put John Glenn on the national stage to understand why he was so revered.

I was seven years old in 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik I and my memory of it is so vivid that I even recall the month: October. As kids, we could tell this scared the bejesus out of the grown ups and that in turn scared the bejesus out of us. I guess we thought it meant atom bombs would be hurled from space. The sisters doubled up on our duck-and-cover drills. It didn’t occur to us that Sputnik was the size of a beach ball and weighed 180 pounds. Four years later, we were shocked again when Yuri Gagarin didn’t just poke his nose into space, but orbited the earth. I distinctly remember my father muttering about idiot government scientists who couldn’t even launch small satellites without blowing them to bits in Florida.

Alan Shepard’s measly sub-orbital lob a month after Gagarin’s flight at least put some points on the board, but it seemed a pale, unsatisfying rejoinder. The post-flight loss of Gus Grissom’s Mercury 4 and his near drowning two months later left the country jittery and uncertain of its space prowess. Then came John Glenn. His three-orbit flight in February 1962, after weeks of delays, electrified the country in the way that the lunar landing—just seven years later—did. Yet I think Glenn was treasured to an extent that perhaps even Neil Armstrong was not. If that’s true, it’s probably because Glenn was a single-combat warrior who triumphed in the darkest and most fearful days of the Cold War. We knew Glenn’s Atlas was man rated, but the ink on the type certificate was still wet when he wedged himself into Friendship 7. We also knew that Armstrong stood on the shoulders of 400,000 able scientists, engineers and technicians. Glenn was Lindbergh to Armstrong’s Donald Douglas.

In the fall of the same year Glenn flew, the Cold War nearly turned hot with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Glenn never lost his sheen as a steely-eyed hero. So precious was he, in fact, that NASA and the Kennedy Administration determined he was too valuable to lose and struck his name from the astronaut rotation. It’s hard to imagine anyone reaching such vaunted heights today. Glenn resigned from NASA, became a Senator from Ohio, ran for president and flew in space again on the Space Shuttle in 1998, at 77.

Although I never met Glenn, I had a personal connection. When I took over as editor of our sister publication, IFR, in 1991, Glenn was still an active pilot and subscribed to the magazine. I seem to recall he had a Baron. He sent in a couple of On the Air contributions and notes to the editor, with a request to not use his name. I’m not sure why he thought that. It’s not like anyone was about to challenge him.

Glenn was, undeniably, a man shaped by his times. He grew up during the depression, fought in two wars and found himself ideally placed to explore the emerging high frontier. He did so with a professionalism and self-effacing grace that may have been unique to the post-war years.It may seem as unavoidable as it is trite to say it, but Glenn’s backup for the first orbital flight, Scott Carpenter, famously ad libbed over a launch comm link what served him in life and now in death: Godspeed, John Glenn.

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