CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — John Glenn fever gripped Cape Canaveral on Friday, just as it did half a century ago when America was on the verge of launching its first man into orbit.
Hundreds of NASA workers jammed a space center auditorium, three days before the 50th anniversary of Glenn’s historic flight, to see and hear the first American to circle the Earth.
The 90-year-old Glenn was joined on stage by Scott Carpenter, 86, the only other survivor of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, as the anniversary festivities began.
Glenn recalled how he and his fellow Mercury astronauts traveled during their training to Cape Canaveral to watch a missile blast off. It was a night launch, and the rocket blew apart over their heads.
“That wasn’t a very good confidence-builder for our first trip to the cape,” Glenn said.
Improvements were made, and Glenn said he gained confidence in his Mercury-Atlas rocket, a converted nuclear missile. Otherwise, he said, he would not have climbed aboard.
Glenn’s Friendship 7 capsule circled Earth three times on Feb. 20, 1962. Carpenter followed aboard Aurora 7 on May 24, 1962. It was Carpenter who called out “Godspeed John Glenn” moments before Glenn’s launch.
They were the third and fourth Americans to rocket into space. Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom flew short suborbital missions in 1961, the same year the Soviet Union launched two cosmonauts into orbit on separate shots.
Glenn, a U.S. senator for Ohio for 24 years, returned to orbit aboard shuttle Discovery in 1998, becoming the world’s oldest spaceman at age 77 and cementing his super-galactic status.
“Flying in space at age 77, you’ve given me hope. I’ve got a few good years left, and I’m ready,” Kennedy Space Center director Robert Cabana, a former shuttle commander, told Glenn.
Another retired shuttle commander, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., shared how the Mercury astronauts “really lit up the world for me in terms of probability or possibility of things that we could do.”
Glenn and his wife, Annie, who turned 92 on Friday, were on hand Thursday evening for the attempted liftoff of the newest of the Atlas rockets, an unmanned booster that NASA contractors hope one day will carry astronauts. Windy weather forced a scrub of the Navy satellite launch.
Today, Glenn and Carpenter will reunite with more than 100 retirees who worked on Project Mercury. And on Monday, the actual anniversary, Glenn will be feted at Ohio State University; its school of public affairs bears his name.
Glenn pointed out how cellphones have “more computing capacity than anything back at the time when we were flying in ’62.”
