American hero
John Glenn’s story is a testament to how a brave man can live a life serving his country.
Sitting atop a rocket originally designed to rain nuclear bombs onto America’s enemies, one courageous Marine lying in a cramped space capsule listened to the countdown for his launch into orbit.
John Glenn Jr., an impossibly optimistic pilot born in the nation’s heartland, knew all too well that his country had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the nascent space race between superpowers. A cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth a year earlier, the United States was the underdog, and we had pinned all hopes of catching up with the USSR on Glenn’s flight.
It was an era when the superpowers stood on the brink of nuclear war, when space exploration was deemed a priority for national security and when rockets built by the U.S. had a harrowing habit of exploding on the launch pad.
As the last seconds of the tense countdown ticked away, as the world watched on black-andwhite television sets, one of Glenn’s fellow astronauts, Scott Carpenter, echoed the national mood of that moment with a terse radio transmission. “Godspeed, John Glenn,” he said. Seven seconds later, fire shot from the base of the Atlas booster that launched Glenn into space and into history. Seven months later, President John F. Kennedy confidently pronounced to a crowd gathered at Rice University seven prophetic words: “We choose to go to the moon.” Seven years later, astronauts saluted an American flag on the lunar surface.
John Glenn, the last of the original seven Mercury astronauts, passed into history Thursday. Unless you lived through those early days of the space race, you may find it hard to imagine how his three-orbit rocket ride shot America’s national pride into the heavens.
Today, astronauts are almost anonymous, walking among us unnoticed even here in Houston where they’re our neighbors. But Glenn flew into the national psyche in an era when space travelers were revered as the high-flying conquerors of a new frontier. Boys and girls clipped photographs of him out of magazines and dreamed of becoming astronauts. A generation that needed all the heroes it could get found a role model in the World War II and Korean War fighter pilot from Cambridge, Ohio.
His service to our country could have easily ended with the splashdown of his Mercury capsule, but the people of Ohio later elected him to four terms in the U.S. Senate. In 1984, more than two decades after his historic Mercury mission, he ran a respectable but unsuccessful campaign for the presidency.
And in one of the most remarkable events of his remarkable life, at the age of 77, Glenn persuaded NASA officials to send him back into orbit aboard a space shuttle flight. Somehow, he convinced them they might learn something about aging if they sent an old guy back into space after all those years. But the most important lesson anybody learned from that shuttle flight was that, even after 77 years, nobody could keep John Glenn down.
Today, at a time when people who go into public service are cynically reviled and subjected to corrosive disparagement, Glenn’s story is a testament to how a brave and honorable man can live a life serving his country. And as a new president prepares to move into the White House and the future of America’s space program seems up in the air, his passing should serve as an enduring reminder of our nation’s proud heritage in manned space exploration.
Our world still needs all the heroes it can get. Sadly, we’ve lost one of America’s most famous figures of the last century. So the message that echoed around the world that day more than a half century ago bears repeating.
Godspeed, John Glenn.
Our world still needs all the heroes it can get. Sadly, we’ve lost one of America’s most famous figures of the last century.