50 years since Glenn’s orbit

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50 years since Glenn’s orbit

February 18th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Just outside Glenn’s office at Ohio State is the hand controller he used to fly the Friendship 7 capsule. The display box also holds the small failed thruster.

The artifacts are among more than 1,000 boxloads of materials he gave Ohio State for safekeeping and display, with more to come. The items span his entire life, from his small-town Ohio boyhood to his ace-flying days of World War II and Korea, to NASA to Democratic U.S. senator for his home state for 24 years, to his brief bid for president in 1984.

The capsule itself and Glenn’s silver spacesuit are at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Glenn hasn’t auctioned any of his memorabilia, unlike some space pioneers who have found themselves in legal tussles with NASA. “I have never sold a single thing. Nor will I,” Glenn said firmly.

His hope is that the mementos drum up interest among schoolchildren in space, science and technology.

A collectible from that first flight inspired astronaut Donald Pettit, 56, now a resident of the International Space Station. He recalls getting a pair of Red Ball Jets sneakers as a boy growing up in Oregon, and inside the box was a 45-rpm record of Glenn describing his orbital flight. The recording blew Pettit away, as did the photos of the pioneering astronauts that appeared in Life magazine. (Life held exclusive rights to the stories of the original Mercury Seven astronauts.)

From that moment on, Pettit was captivated with space, as were so many of his Cold War-born generation.

With Glenn’s flight, “spaceflight moved from science fiction to science fact,” Pettit said from orbit last month.

All told, 330 Americans have followed Glenn into orbit.

Glenn was actually the third American — and the fifth person — to rocket into space. Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom were confined to 15-minute suborbital hops in 1961, the same year the two Soviet cosmonauts blazed trails into orbit.

America was badly behind. Unmanned U.S. rockets kept exploding on the launch pads.

“Rocket performance was far from predictable,” Armstrong noted in his email.

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The stakes couldn’t have been higher when it came time for Glenn to soar. And fears abounded as to whether a man could survive weightlessness: Would his vision be impaired to the point he couldn’t land his vessel? Could he swallow food? Might he become so elated with space that he might never wish to return to Earth?

Glenn often is asked whether he was afraid.

“Are you apprehensive about the situation you’re in? Yeah, but you volunteered, you want to do this thing, it’s important for the country, and you’re glad to have been selected for it, and you’re going to do the best job you can possibly do.”

Ten times Glenn’s launch was delayed. Finally, on the morning of Feb. 20, 1962, Carpenter called out from the blockhouse, “Godspeed John Glenn” moments before the Mercury-Atlas rocket ignited.

Glenn did not hear Carpenter’s poetic send-off until after the flight.

“That meant a lot, and it’s meant a lot since then,” Glenn said. “It just showed we were all working together at that time.”

The words came to Carpenter at that moment. It’s become one of the most memorable quotes from spaceflight.

What Glenn needed was “simply speed, and it occurred to me that you could ask the higher power for the speed,” Carpenter said earlier this month from his winter home in South Florida.

“It was an appropriate bon voyage, a prayer, goodbye and good luck all wrapped up with a concise statement, I think,” Carpenter said.

He will join John and Annie Glenn, and their children, semiretired Dr. David Glenn, and artist Lyn Glenn, in anniversary celebrations at Kennedy Space Center on Friday and Saturday. Married for 68 years, the Glenns are virtually inseparable. They met in the playpen as toddlers in New Concord, Ohio.

More than 100 retirees who worked on Project Mercury also will gather for a reunion this weekend at Cape Canaveral. On Monday, the actual anniversary, the Glenns will attend an Ohio State gala.

The two surviving Mercury astronauts will pay homage to their deceased colleagues: Shepard, Grissom, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton.

The seven remain bonded forever.

“We were very competitive and we worked very, very hard,” Glenn recalled. “But once somebody had been selected for a flight, you never saw a group get together any tighter than that group to support that flight, and that’s just the way it was. That happened that way on every single flight.”

They believed strongly in what they were doing, Glenn said.

Once Americans achieved orbit and caught up with the Soviets, “I think people really felt that we really were on the way back, sort of a turning point, I think, in our national psyche,” Glenn said.

So it’s distressing for Glenn that 50 years after his first spaceflight, America no longer has its own means of getting astronauts to orbit.

Glenn still rues the day in 2004, one year after the Columbia disaster, that President George W. Bush announced the space shuttle program would end in 2010, to be followed by a moon base and eventual Mars expeditions. The lunar idea was shelved by President Barack Obama, and asteroids are the newest targets of opportunity.

In the months leading up to the final shuttle flight last July, Glenn tried, in vain, to persuade Obama to keep the ships flying until a replacement rocket became available.

“It’s unseemly to me that here we are supposedly the world’s greatest spacefaring nation and we don’t even have a way to get back and forth to our own International Space Station,” he said.

NASA remains dependent on Russia until U.S. private industry is able to take astronauts to the space station — an estimated five years away.

“The leaders of tomorrow are on the campuses of today,” Glenn likes to say about the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. When reminded that the astronauts of tomorrow are, too, he noted: “If we can just get something for them to ride.”