Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Approaching the space agency directly with a notion this outrageous was, of course, not the way to go. If 20 years in Washington had taught Glenn anything, it was that bureaucratic balance wheels have to be turned gently. He decided to start by contacting a few NASA physicians and asking them, almost casually, if they had ever looked into the astronaut-geriatric parallel. Why, yes, they had, the doctors said. As a matter of fact, they had published a little pamphlet on the topic. Would Glenn like a copy...
Finally, in the summer of 1996, Glenn was ready. He approached NASA administrator Goldin and formally pitched his case for returning to space. "I told him there are 34 million Americans over 65, and that's due to triple in the next 50 years," Glenn recalls. "And I told him someone ought to look into this." Goldin, savvy about the wiles of flight-hungry astronauts--even flight-hungry astronauts who haven't flown in 34 years--saw medical merit in the argument and offered Glenn a deal. If the science held up to peer review, he promised, and if Glenn...
...yeoman like Glenn will have his hands full getting ready to fly aboard his new ship. The first time Glenn flew, he was in a mere demitasse of a spacecraft--one with a single window, 56 toggle switches and barely 36 cu. ft. of habitable space. The joke around NASA in that earlier era was that you didn't so much climb inside a Mercury capsule...
...since become accustomed to Glenn's doing outsize things and incurring outsize risks. In the eighth decade of life, however, she justifiably assumed all that was behind her. "Annie was a little cool to the idea to begin with," Glenn confesses. But in the tradition of a military and NASA wife, she listened to his reasons for wanting to return to space, familiarized herself with his mission and then, as she had done so many times before, proceeded to help him train...