Word: agee
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hear NASA's detractors tell it, Glenn is manifestly unfit for space travel of any kind. Flying into orbit more than a third of a century after he last made the trip, more than a dozen years after most people his age have begun retiring, and only months after the death of fellow Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard illustrated the frailties of even the most resilient flesh, is, they argue, at best showboating and at worst reckless...
...school for the trip to Cape Canaveral. This time wife, children and the Glenns' two grandsons will all be there for lift-off. Glenn takes a small, whimsical pleasure in pointing out that his grandsons, who will be 16 and 14 in the fall, are the same age his son and daughter--now 52 and 50--were the last time he flew...
...return to space, this kind of existential ciphering is irresistible. The country is now further in time from Glenn's first trip into orbit, for example, than Glenn's first trip into orbit was from Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. A man who was Glenn's current age when Glenn was born would himself have been 17 years old when the Civil War began. Then too, there are the people who saw Glenn's first flight who either will or won't be here for the second. Khrushchev, Kennedy, Johnson, Mao Zedong--all towering figures in 1962, all dust...
This is no country for old men, so John Glenn will be leaving it in October--will quit the entire planet and head out for a realm where age doesn't count. Oddly, it was the realization that young people go through the process of aging in space--cardiovascular shifts, immune-system changes, loss of muscle and of bone density--that gave Glenn his long-sought means of getting back to the extra-world that made him. What was a usable scientific rationale for him became a new way to understand space for others. If the young temporarily grow...
...beat me to the punch with the age question. I swear he almost fell off the ledge of his truck when hearing "almost 20." It would be interesting to find out his low ball estimate. He was 21. How perfect, someone my own age. Why, we should have lots in common...