Word: glenn
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...Glenn is going aloft to do more than tuck into the cuisine. Discovery will ferry a number of payloads in its cargo bay, including a Spartan satellite that will be released into space to take readings of the sun, a pallet of sensors to measure the ultraviolet environment of space, and several new components for the Hubble Space Telescope that need to be tested in the extreme conditions of space. Most important, the ship is carrying the Spacehab science module, a pressurized laboratory that is connected to the crew compartment and provides additional space for conducting medical experiments...
Those tests would try the patience of any patient. Throughout the flight, Glenn's heart rate, respiration, blood volume and pressure will be monitored regularly. Doctors on Earth want to analyze his blood for immune function and protein levels, and this will require taking so many samples that throughout the flight, Glenn will wear a catheter implanted in his arm, allowing easy access to a vein without a new needle stick each time. He will wear a suit wired with sensors to measure his sleep cycles and will swallow a horse-pill-size thermometer that will take temperature readings...
These and other findings will be compared with base-line readings taken before lift-off, which are already being assembled. Glenn routinely walks around the grounds of NASA's Houston facility with monitors strapped to his wrist and belt. When he returns from space, he will face yet another battery of tests, including an MRI to look for changes in his spinal cord and bone-density tests to look for mineral loss. "All of this," Glenn says, "gives us the potential not only of dealing with the frailties of our already aged population but of helping younger people avoid problems...
...NASA says. Not everyone in the space community agrees. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian and chairman of the Duke University history department, has been outspokenly skeptical of Glenn's mission, questioning its scientific value and dismissing it as a trivial or even foolish use of NASA's scarce resources. If critics like Roland are right, the mission's science is merely a fig leaf. If it's a fig leaf, what is it covering? "This space flight is the same as the first one," says John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists...
Whether or not this is true, there is no denying that Glenn's 1998 mission will be rich with echoes from his 1962 mission. Once again there will be the program-pre-empting coverage; once again Annie Glenn and her family will be seen watching anxiously as the rocket that carries the head of the household explodes off the ground and falls back to Earth; once again there should be the triumphal return...