SINCERELY SCOTTY BY WALTER SCOTT: A Tribute to John Glenn
“The journey is the reward.” — Steve Jobs
Although John Glenn would never claim to be a national hero, the rest of the world would declare it to be a fact. As a kid he was fascinated with airplanes and flight. He actually flew his own private plane until he was 90. He died at age 95.
John Glenn, who traveled to space in 1962, became the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. I came to NASA in 1966, but followed NASA before then. While working at Holloman Air Force Base in 1962, I was following John’s historic flight. During one of his three orbits, he commented that he could see White Sands clearly from orbit. Holloman is beside White Sands National Park. I suspect that had some influence on the location of Sky Harbor, one of the alternate Shuttle landing sites. Then, decades later, after 24 years in the U.S. Senate and other interests, he returned to NASA for a Shuttle mission on the Discovery. Glenn was a hero long before he became an astronaut. He was a Marine Corps pilot who flew 59 missions in World War II and 63 missions in Korea. He preferred to come in low on strafing runs and was rewarded with many bullet holes in his plane. A Marine Colonel, a U.S. senator, a father and grandfather, he was best known to millions as the first American to orbit the Earth, a feat he achieved three times on Feb. 20, 1962.
Glenn attended Test Pilot School at the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, Md. He was assigned to the Fighter Design Branch of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics (now Bureau of Naval Weapons) in Washington from November 1956 to April 1959. In July 1957, while he was project officer of the F-8U Crusader, he set a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York — 3 hours and 23 minutes. It was the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed.
John Glenn was a member of the original seven astronauts. They were a unique set; all were test pilots. General Motors gave each of the original seven matching Corvettes. They each had assigned parking spaces so we at the center could readily see who was here and who was away from the center. While the flight of Friendship 7 was an apparent success, there were problems most did not know about. The flight control system failed after the first orbit forcing Glenn to fly the rest of the mission manually. It had been planned as a 30 minute test, but it became a life or death issue for him. A second more serious problem occurred when instrumentation told him his heat shield was loose. Had it come off, he and the spacecraft would have burned up during re-entry.
After what Glenn himself called a “fireball” reentry into the earth’s atmosphere, the astronaut’s capsule descended by parachute into the Atlantic near the Bahamas. His Friendship 7 capsule was fished out of the ocean by the destroyer Noa within 21 minutes after splashdown, with Glenn reporting that he was in good condition.
In 1998, Glenn flew on the STS-95 Discovery shuttle flight, a nine-day mission during which the crew supported a variety of research payloads including deployment of the Spartan solar-observing spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope Orbital Systems Test Platform, and Glenn’s investigations on space flight and the aging process. ww At age 77 he was the oldest astronaut in history, yet he successfully passed the astronaut physical and was cleared to fly.
Glenn is truly an American hero. Before he became a NASA pilot, Glenn was a U.S. Navy pilot during World War II who flew missions during the Korean War. Glenn also served in the Senate from 1974 to 1999 representing his home state of Ohio.
Yes, John Glenn truly enjoyed the journey of life. He was a quiet, gentle, and friendly man – a dedicated American hero. His legacy is such that all young people should pattern their life after.
Walter Scott
NASA Retired