Word: glenn
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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...
NASA will never admit this publicly, of course, and when Glenn goes back to the pad next October, he will go as just another crew member, a lowly payload specialist setting off for a week or so of work. But even NASA administrator Daniel Goldin seems to concede that when he inks the name Glenn onto a flight manifest, he writes more than just a name. "There is," he declared the day he announced Glenn's return to space, "only one John Glenn...
...most accounts, John Kennedy is the key to why Glenn still has the itch to fly in space. When Glenn went aloft on Feb. 20, 1962, the U.S. was taking its first toddling steps on its long march to the moon. Although he was 40, Glenn figured he still had a lot of flying ahead of him. When he returned to Earth, he found otherwise. Like any other astronaut, he periodically approached Bob Gilruth, head of the Mercury program, to inquire about his position in the flight rotation; unlike any other astronaut, he was routinely stonewalled. "Headquarters doesn't want...
...first, Glenn accepted this with a shrug, but as time went by and more and more of his astronaut brothers were chosen for the Gemini and Apollo programs that followed Mercury, he grew increasingly frustrated. Finally, in 1964, he resigned from NASA. "It was only years later that I read in a book that Kennedy had passed the word that he didn't want me to go back up," Glenn says. "I don't know if he was afraid of the political fallout if I got killed, but by the time I found out, he had been dead for some...
...Glenn spent the next decade working in private industry, most notably (and incongruously) as an executive with the Royal Crown Cola company. In 1974 he parlayed his still glittering name recognition into a seat in the U.S. Senate. Even as a member of Congress, he remained smitten with space travel, but as an aging lawmaker who hadn't been in a flight rotation or ready room in years, he accepted the fact that his professional flying career was over. And it was--at least until three years...