95 years defined by five hours

What is the best way to fathom the historical legacy of Col. John H. Glenn Jr., who died on Thursday at 95? Glenn is generally considered the world’s fifth astronaut, and was the first American to orbit the Earth, circling the planet thrice on the afternoon of Feb. 20, 1962. On that date, Glenn was already 40 years old. Like the other Mercury astronauts, among whose number he was the last survivor, he had been a celebrated aviator, flying 149 fighter missions in two wars (and scoring three aerial victories in Korea). His five hours in the Friendship 7 capsule were considered the first meaningful U.S. success in the “Space Race” with the Soviet Union.

As a consequence, he immediately became more famous, by an order of magnitude, than his Mercury colleagues. The Glenn cult was so strong that for years students grew up thinking that John Glenn had been the first American in space, or even the first human. (Works of popular culture like Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff have corrected that impression somewhat.) Handsome and optimistic in a way that only a Marine can be, but lacking the hard, super-macho personality edges that some of his colleagues exhibited, Glenn was regarded by NASA as a public-relations natural from the time of his recruitment. He grew close to the Kennedy family, and no one in the administration was too upset when he dropped out of the space program after one flight to try his hand as a Democratic politician.

Most political careers are disappointing, and Glenn’s was perhaps no exception. Health problems and the violence suffered by the Kennedys delayed his journey to high office. Before reaching the Senate in 1974, and for another decade thereafter, he had a nasty rivalry with Ohio Democratic eminence Howard Metzenbaum. Later, as a contender for the Oval Office, he had a similar long-running dogfight with Walter Mondale. His most serious run for a presidential nomination came in 1984, and it went nowhere.

In retrospect he might have done better than Mondale running head-to-head against Ronald Reagan: it is hard to imagine anyone doing worse. His name recognition was second to none, and he exploited his record as a Marine flyer and astronaut effectively, particularly in his famous “Gold Star Mothers” exchange with Metzenbaum. But that might have been the problem: He exploited those things ... and was seen exploiting them.

People accepted it and liked it when he tore Metzenbaum apart for suggesting that a veteran was less qualified for political leadership than a gifted businessman. But the moment did make him look like just another politician, and in the end he was treated that way in electoral competition. Returning to space aboard the shuttle Discovery at age 77 might not have helped his legacy much in the long run, either. His sordid publicity bargain with NASA was poorly disguised by the “experiments” in geriatrics that were devised to justify his free ride — and critics said so.

Glenn’s outsized role in the Space Race is naturally bound to fade as Cold War politics recede further and further from memory. Historians are still assembling clearer, brighter pictures of the Soviet heroes who preceded him into orbit. With time, we will all come to accept those men as equal in stature, even though their deeds were not broadcast on television. Enthusiasts of golden-age space exploration might already consider Glenn a poor cousin to someone like John Young, who ate an illicit corned-beef sandwich on Gemini 3, walked on the Moon, and took the shuttle into orbit for the first time. (And I’ve mentioned only half his spaceflights.)

But the glamour of the Mercury Seven will endure, and with good reason. There’s something about the Mercury spaceflights that movies and popular books about the American space program do not make quite as explicit as they could. It’s this: The Atlas launch vehicle that John Glenn was the first to ride into orbit was really just a missile — an ICBM designed to carry a nuclear payload to an arbitrary point on the planet.

When you imagine space flight, you probably think of a rocket like the later Saturn V that has been designed with human passengers, including their various biological tolerances, in mind. The Atlas-D was nothing like that at all. It was just a missile somebody decided to put people on. If you check, you will find that the main change the engineers made in order to develop a “man-rated” Atlas rocket was to build a second assembly line at the Convair factory and to tell the workers on it “Hey, these ones will have astronauts, so be extra careful, guys.”

Of the rockets in this special series, nine were flown. As it turned out, the four manned flights to orbit were all successful; of the five others, two weren’t. Seven good rockets out of nine: Think about that math. And remember that John Glenn and the others could not have known, before soaring into the blue and then the black, that the odds were even as favourable as that. John Glenn in his Mercury flight suit.