Word: astronautical
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Walter Schirra, 60, lives with his wife of 37 years in an exclusive development southwest of Denver, travels frequently and especially enjoys big-game hunting. The only astronaut to fly in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, he does TV commercials and other promotion for Tang, the orange drink that the astronauts slurped in space, and for Actifed cold tablets. Although he sits on the boards of several companies, the affable Schirra says he works only when he wants to: "I'm through punching time clocks...
...loyalist to the space program, remained with NASA until 1982, when he became president of Houston's Space Services Inc., the first American privately financed space enterprise. Divorced this year, he revels in flying his formula midget racing plane in competitions, but otherwise keeps a low profile. His astronaut celebrity, he says, was something to be tolerated rather than enjoyed: "I just learned to cope with...
...then flash ahead a few scenes. It is the day of a launch, and Glenn is on the phone with his wife, a painful stutterer. Vice President Lyndon Johnson is fuming in his limousine outside the Glenn house, a NASA official is badgering Glenn, but the astronaut stands firm. "Annie, listen to me. I will back you all the way, one hundred percent," says Glenn. "I don't want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our house." Cut to a weepy but relieved Annie Glenn, then cut back...
Glenn unquestionably fares better on celluloid than in Tom Wolfe's book, published to high acclaim in 1979. As caught in the whambang whirl of Wolfe's prose, the young astronaut seemed more of a Presbyterian prude, a sort of born-again Sky King. While Wolfe poked fun at Glenn the boy policing the language of his school chums, the film focuses only on Glenn the adult. Other digs are neatly skipped over. Wolfe, for example, implies that Glenn sought out NASA officials to discuss replacing Alan Shephard on the first flight, but not a hint of that...
...before Glenn strikes a mock heroic pose and delivers a few self-deprecating lines. Director Philip Kaufman, who also wrote the screenplay, admits that he has no idea if the Senator is capable of laughing at himself, but old newsreel footage of a beaming Glenn convinced him that the astronaut at least must have been "good-natured." According to Kaufman, the doting scene also prepares the viewer for the later exchange between the Glenns about barring Johnson from the house...