Glenn’s Shuttle Mission
29 OCTOBER-9 NOVEMBER 1998
GLENN’S SHUTTLE MISSION
At 19 minutes after 1400 this afternoon, Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center roared to life with the lift-off of the space shuttle Discovery (OV-103). COL Curtis L. Brown, Jr., commanded Mission STS-95 with his Air Force buddy COL Steven W. Lindsey piloting. The other military astronaut aboard was destined in the next 30 minutes to become the oldest man in space to date, 77-year-old Payload Specialist COL (Ret) John H. Glenn, Jr., USMC. On October 15th, and for several months after today’s shuttle flight, the main causeway at the Space Center in Florida had been temporarily re-named “John Glenn Parkway.”
A USMC fighter pilot in WWII and Korea, by 1998 John Glenn was a national hero. His Mercury 6 space mission of February 1962 was the first in which an American orbited the Earth. His capsule for that flight, Friendship 7, was on display at the Smithsonian Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC. Since retiring from the astronaut program in 1964, Glenn had followed a new career in public service, becoming a 6-term Senator for the State of Ohio.
Glenn’s duties for this shuttle mission were to study the parallels in physiology between human aging and space flight. For years, NASA and the National Institute for Aging had collaborated on research into human aging, after it was noted how similarly spaceflight and aging effect the human body. In a designed laboratory in the shuttle’s payload bay, Glenn worked on the nine-day mission to document changes in balance, perception, immune response, metabolism, bone and muscle density, blood flow, and sleep associated with weightlessness. Glenn’s return to space 36 years after his first flight was the longest time between missions for any human. Personal attributes beyond his age, such as intelligence and physical fitness, made him the ideal candidate to study the space effects of aging. Meanwhile, his fellow astronauts deployed the SPARTAN 201 satellite for two days of free fight to study solar wind, then recaptured it. Hardware that would be used on a later Hubble Telescope maintenance flight was readied.
Discovery orbited 134 times, a far cry for Glenn’s three orbits of his Mercury mission. As they had done for his initial space flight in 1962, the Australian towns of Perth and Rockingham, in darkness during Glenn’s 1962 mission, turned on all their public and private lights, a salute to Glenn. Another first for the mission was the presence of Payload Specialist Pedro Duque, the first Spaniard in space, representing the European Space Agency. They all touched down safely at the Kennedy Space Center at noon on November 9th, Glenn becoming one of the few astronauts to experience both a splash down and a touch down.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 5 NOV 24
CAPT James Bloom, Ret
Glenn, John with Nick Taylor. John Glenn: A Memoir. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1999.
“John Glenn Returns to Space.” NASA Glenn Research Center, NASA website. AT: http://www.nasa.gov/ centers/glenn/about/ bios/shuttle_mission.html, retrieved 24 January 2013.
“STS-95.” NASA website. AT: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/ shuttle/archives/sts-95/, retrieved 24 January 2013.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: On her 39 missions, the space shuttle Discovery amassed nearly 366 days in space. She is currently preserved at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution in Chantilly, Virginia.
