John Glenn, an enduring icon of the U.S. space program who once trained in Hampton Roads to become the first American to orbit the Earth, died Thursday in a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.
In his post-NASA career, Glenn served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio.
Glenn was the last surviving member of the original Mercury seven astronauts who in 1959 formed the Space Task Group at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton. There, they trained for three years in spaceflight training and simulations, including skin-diving to mimic the weightlessness of space and the disorientation of re-entry. Glenn made his historic flight on Feb. 20, 1962.
The late NASA Langley researcher Bill Scallion recalled those early years in an online account for NASA Langley in 2012.
“You could tell John Glenn to do anything and he’d do it right,” Scallion said. “There’s a picture of him up on some pedestal waving in a spacesuit. Actually, he was waving at me when I was leaving, after making him sit in that capsule in the trainer for four and a half hours.”
All but Glenn moved their families to Hampton Roads until training was completed in June 1962. Glenn opted to stay in military quarters in neighboring Langley Air Force Base and visit his family in northern Virginia on weekends.
They were all “exceptional people,” Scallion said.
After he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1974, Glenn served on Capitol Hill for 24 years and made a halfhearted run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. When he was 77 and completing his fourth Senate term in 1998, he had one final flight of glory, returning to space as a crew member aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
The space race
On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union made a bold advance on the Cold War chessboard by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. In response, the U.S. government formed NASA in 1958 — replacing its predecessor NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — amid widespread fear that the country was falling behind the Soviets in technology and military strength.
Of the seven original astronauts of the Mercury program — the others were M. Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Walter M. “Wally” Schirra Jr., Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton — Glenn was the oldest and the lone Marine. A lieutenant colonel at the time, he also had the highest rank and the most combat experience.
In 1998, Hampton resident and former Project Mercury engineer Ed Kilgore told the Daily Press that Glenn was “probably the straightest of the whole bunch.”
“The others were a little different,” Kilgore said. “They had more trouble believing anything could happen to them. Glenn was a little more down-to-earth. He was just a straight-shooter from day one.”
Glenn’s passing comes at a moment when the efforts of the female mathematicians at NASA Langley, known as “human computers,” who helped launch him and the space race in the 1950s and 1960s are earning acclaim in a new book and upcoming film called “Hidden Figures.”
One of those mathematicians is Hampton resident Katherine Johnson, now 98.
As the story goes, Glenn was leery of the calculations for his flight trajectory that were then being cooked up by an actual computer. So he asked Johnson to use her math skills to verify it.
‘Godspeed, John Glenn.’
When the astronauts voted among themselves to confer the honor of being the first American in space, they chose Shepard.
On May 5, 1961, Shepard had a 15-minute suborbital space flight, followed two months later by Grissom on a similar mission. But two Soviet cosmonauts had already circled the Earth by August 1961.
Glenn’s turn came on Feb. 20, 1962. After 11 delays because of bad weather or faulty equipment, he sat in his tiny space capsule, the Friendship 7, atop an MA-6 rocket that had failed in 40 percent of its test flights.
After liftoff at 9:47 a.m., backup pilot Carpenter said on national television, “Godspeed, John Glenn.”
The moment was shared by practically the entire nation, as a television audience of 135 million — the largest up to that time — witnessed the launch.
The flight plan called for seven orbits, but after the first, the capsule began to wobble. Glenn overrode the automatic navigation system and piloted Friendship 7 with manual controls for two more orbits, reaching a height of 162 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Midway through the flight, a warning light indicated that the heat shield, which would protect the capsule during its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, may have come loose. Without a heat shield, it was possible that Glenn could burn up inside the capsule as it raced back from space.
As Friendship 7 was descending, all radio contact was lost. Shepard, acting as “capsule communicator” from Cape Canaveral, tried to reach Glenn in his spacecraft, saying, “How do you read? Over.”
After about 4 minutes and 20 seconds of silence, Glenn could finally be heard: “Loud and clear. How me?”
“How are you doing?” Shepard asked.
“Oh, pretty good,” Glenn casually responded, later adding, “but that was a real fireball, boy.”
Exterior pieces of the capsule had broken off during re-entry and burst into flame. A defective warning light caused much of the panic, but during those four tense minutes, it was feared that Glenn had been lost — along with the promise of the space program.
When he splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean after 4 hours 56 minutes aloft, Glenn emerged as an almost mythic figure who had scaled heights no American had reached before.
“I was fully aware of the danger,” he said in 1968. “No matter what preparation you make, there comes the moment of truth. You’re playing with big stakes — your life. But the important thing to me wasn’t fear but what you can do to control it.”
A month after Glenn’s historic flight, the Mercury astronauts were feted along a 25-mile parade route through Hampton and Newport News. Hampton was dubbed “Spacetown U.S.A.” Military Highway was renamed Mercury Boulevard in their honor.
NASA Langley played other key roles in Project Mercury, besides helping to train its astronauts. Scientists there helped design the rockets that in December 1959 and January 1960 sent two monkeys into space as a prelude to human flight. They developed a heat shield to protect the astronauts on re-entry, and an escape system. They developed a radio communications program for the capsules in space. And one of its wind tunnels was used to test a full-scale model of a Mercury capsule.
In 1998, Glenn made history again when he returned to space as a “payload specialist” aboard the space shuttle, becoming at 77 the oldest astronaut to fly in space.
That year, he told the Daily Press that training for that mission made him nostalgic for his younger days training in Hampton.
NASA Langley director Dave Bowles said Thursday that the center “joins the nation in mourning the loss of John Glenn.”
“We salute his many contributions and sacrifices that helped change the way we fly and explore,” Bowles said.
Flying lessons in his teens
John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, and grew up in New Concord, Ohio. His father ran a plumbing supply business and later had a Chevrolet dealership. His mother taught at an elementary school.
He took flying lessons in his teens and left college early in 1942 to enter a Navy pilot training program before transferring to the aviation branch of the Marine Corps. On April 6, 1943, he married Anna “Annie” Castor, whom he had known since childhood.
During World War II, Glenn flew 59 missions as a fighter pilot and took part in the Marshall Islands campaign in the Pacific. He was stationed on Guam in the Western Pacific and was a flight instructor in Texas before returning to action in the Korean War, where he flew 90 missions as a jet fighter pilot.
After Korea, Glenn was a test pilot at the naval air station at Patuxent River, Md., and set a transcontinental speed record on July 16, 1957, by flying an F8U-1 Crusader jet coast to coast in 3 hours 23 minutes.
He worked at the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics and eventually was awarded a bachelor’s degree by Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio.
When NASA began recruiting a team of astronauts, it sought skilled pilots who could withstand rigorous physical and psychological testing and who — to fit into cramped space capsules — were shorter than 5 feet 11 inches tall. (Glenn was 5-foot-10 1/2.)
With their courage and know-how, the Mercury astronauts embodied the spirit of the “New Frontier” espoused by John F. Kennedy, and Glenn became friends with the youthful president and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general.
Encouraged by the Kennedy family, Glenn resigned from the astronaut corps in 1964 to run for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. He dropped out after slipping on a rug and striking his head on a bathtub, resulting in inner-ear problems that required extensive medical treatment. In 1965, he retired from the Marine Corps, having received six Distinguished Flying Crosses and 19 Air Medals.
He then became an executive with Royal Crown Cola, invested in real estate and worked with a management company that operated Holiday Inns, particularly around Orlando, Fla. Within a few years, he was a millionaire.
Joel Levine spent 41 years at NASA, including as a senior research scientist in the science directorate at NASA Langley, before retiring in 2011. Now a professor in applied sciences at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Levine said he never met Glenn while at NASA Langley but appreciates his legacy.
“He was a great advocate for space,” Levine said, and Project Mercury “opened a whole new chapter in space travel.”
“It opened up a whole new habitat for humans, and now we’re expanding that with sending humans to Mars,” Levine said. “So John Glenn orbited the Earth as the first (American) and he showed that it could be done. And now several decades later, we’re planning to send the first crew to the surface of Mars. On the shoulders of John Glenn.”
In addition to his wife, of Columbus and Bethesda, Md., survivors include two children, J. David Glenn of Berkeley, Calif., and Carolyn “Lyn” Glenn of St. Paul, Minn.; and two grandsons.
Daily Press staff writer Tamara Dietrich and The Washington Post contributed to this report.
