‘Godspeed, John Glenn’
First American to orbit Earth passes away at age 95
WASHINGTON
John Glenn was the ultimate all-American hero.
He was the first American to orbit the Earth, a war hero fighter pilot, a record-setting test pilot, a longtime senator, a presidential candidate and a man who defied age and gravity to go back into space at 77.
But those were just his accomplishments. What made John Glenn was more his persona: he was a combat veteran with boy next door looks, a strong marriage and nerves of steel. Schools were named after him. Children were named after him. His life story of striving hard, succeeding, suffering setbacks and high-flying redemption was as American as it gets. Add to that unflagging devotion to a wife he has known since childhood and unerring service to his country.
His life lived up to the famous send-off that fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter gave to him that February 1962 day, just before he became the first American to circle Earth in space: “Godspeed, John Glenn.” John Herschel Glenn Jr. died at the James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, where he was hospitalized for more than a week, said Hank Wilson, communications director for the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. He was 95.
“We are more fulfilled when
we are involved in something bigger than ourselves,” Glenn said at his keynote address at Ohio State University’s commencement in 2009.
Glenn was echoing something he said 50 years earlier, in the NASA news conference introducing him and the other Mercury 7 astronauts to the public after their selection:
“We are placed here with certain talents and capabilities. It is up to each of us to use those talents and capabilities as best you can,” Glenn said on April 9, 1959. “If you do that, I think there is a power greater than any of us that will place the opportunities in our way, and if we use our talents
properly, we will be living the kind of life we should live.”
John Glenn lived that kind of life.
For a generation weaned on the space race, few were bigger than John Glenn. Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, but he was not the celebrity that John Glenn was. The green-eyed, telegenic Glenn even won US$25,000 on the game show “Name That Tune” with a 10-year-old partner, and flew in combat with baseball superstar Ted Williams – all before he was chosen to be an astronaut.
Even though he wasn’t the first American to launch into space – Alan Shepard was – Glenn’s distinction as the first American in orbit seemed to rocket him past the other original Mercury 7 astronauts, what he called “a group dedicated to trying things never tried before.”
And that’s what John Glenn did on Feb. 20, 1962, thundering off a Cape Canaveral launch pad in an Atlas rocket that had never carried humans before to a place America had never been. His cramped capsule’s name – Friendship 7 – fit his personality.
With the all-business phrase, “Roger, the clock is operating, we’re underway,” Glenn started his four hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds in space. Years later, he explained that he said that because he didn’t feel like he had lifted off and the clock was the only way he knew he had launched.
During the flight, Glenn uttered a phrase that he would repeat frequently throughout life: “Zero G and I feel fine.”
“It still seems so vivid to me,” Glenn said in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press on the 50th anniversary of that flight. “I still can sort of pseudo feel some of those same sensations I had back in those days during launch and all.”
Glenn said that he often got asked if he was afraid. His answer: “If you are talking about fear that overcomes what you are supposed to do, no. You’ve trained very hard for those flights.”