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| 3 - 2 - 1 - Ignition - LIFT-OFF! The Atlas 6 rocket with John Glenn in Friendship 7. |
I turn 70-years old this Thursday, February 20, 2020. Today and next Tuesday, blog posts reflect the greatest event that occurred on any of my birthdays... except, of course, the first one in 1950.
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| With my mom in the summer of 1950. |
My twelfth birthday was on February 20, 1962. To help me celebrate, John Glenn blasted off from Cape Canaveral in a tiny Mercury space capsule that morning. His mission was to be the first American to orbit the earth. The photograph below shows Glenn standing beside his wife and Friendship 7 in 2002. You can see the size of the capsule—just big enough for one astronaut and the electronics to keep him up. And hopefully, bring him down safely.
Photos from the days before the flight reveal the harsh reality that this space flight was nothing like science fiction. Hundreds of SciFi authors painted glowing word pictures of the glamor of spaceships and travel in “outer space.” Glenn did not enter the Friendship 7 after walking up a ramp, not by ascending a stairway. You can see in the next photo that Glenn clambered gracelessly down through the hatch and folded himself into the seat.
The capsule was just that, a capsule. President Kennedy toured the capsule with the help of Glenn soon after all data was retrieved. The success of Glenn’s mission was critical to Kenney’s stated goal of having Americans on the moon within ten years.
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| "If you look closely, Mr. President, you can still see the indentations my rear end left in the seat during lift-off." |
NASA’s diagram of the capsule includes the term ballistic in its technical name. Glenn’s spacecraft sat atop at huge missile, actually metal tube filled with explosive fuel, so the ballistic descriptor was more accurate than anyone at NASA wanted to admit.
I remember sitting a watching the lift-off with my family on our black and white console TV screen. We were mesmerized.
Next Tuesday: The flight and the aftermath.
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