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CX2SA > NASA 22.02.06 00:04l 90 Lines 4855 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: John Glenn
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Sent: 060221/2137Z @:CX2SA.LAV.URY.SA #:34758 [Minas] FBB7.00e $:34758_CX2SA
From: CX2SA@CX2SA.LAV.URY.SA
To : NASA@WW
NASA Honors a Legendary Astronaut
=================================
On February 20, 1962, John H. Glenn, Jr., became the first American to orbit
Earth. On the 44th anniversary of his historic mission, NASA presented Glenn
with an Ambassador of Exploration Award in honor of this achievement.
Astronauts involved in 12 missions over 43 years were on hand at the ceremony
at The Ohio State University. Before Glenn took the stage, he was honored in
speeches by Apollo 11 moonwalker Neil Armstrong and Return to Flight
spacewalker Steve Robinson.
Glenn shared anecdotes about his missions, and said it was important that
future generations could draw inspiration from his award, a sample of lunar
rock which will be on display at the university. "The moon is not even the end
of things," said Glenn. "We're going farther than that."
Glenn's Mercury-Atlas 6 mission established the U.S. as a strong contender in
the space race with the Soviet Union, which had launched the world's first
spacecraft, Sputnik, in October 1957 and had also sent the first human, Yuri
Gagarin, into space in April 1961. With Glenn's orbital mission, NASA was at
last seen as being on par with the Soviet program. The mission also made Glenn
an instant hero.
At the age of 77 in his fourth and final term as a U.S. Senator, Glenn again
made history by becoming the oldest human to fly in space as a crewmember of
the Space Shuttle Discovery. During this 1998 shuttle mission, Glenn conducted
a series of investigations into the physiology of the human aging process.
But despite his long Senate service and historic shuttle flight, Glenn will
always be remembered as the first American to orbit the Earth during those
tentative, challenging, daring days when humans were just beginning to venture
beyond the atmosphere that had nurtured them since the species began.
While Glenn's flight on Friendship 7 was a glorious national triumph, problems
arose that could have spelled disaster. The first was a failure of the
automatic control system.
A scheduled 30-minute test to determine whether Glenn could fly the capsule
manually became a matter of life and death when the automatic system went out
at the end of the first orbit.
"I went to manual control and continued in that mode during the second and
third orbits, and during re-entry," Glenn recalled later. "The malfunction just
forced me to prove very rapidly what had been planned over a longer period of
time."
Another problem seemed even more serious -- telemetry indicated the
spacecraft's heat shield was loose. It seemed possible that Glenn and the
spacecraft would be incinerated on re-entry.
Glenn left the retrorocket pack in place to steady the heat shield during re
-entry. "It made for a very spectacular re-entry from where I was sitting," he
said. Big chunks of the burning material came flying by the window.
He wasn't sure whether the flaming debris was the rocket pack or the heat
shield breaking up. "Fortunately," he told an interviewer, "it was the rocket
pack -- or I wouldn't be answering these questions."
NASA is presenting the Ambassador of Exploration Award to the 38 astronauts who
participated in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. The award
consists of a sample of lunar rock encased in Lucite, part of the 842 pounds of
samples brought back to Earth during the six Apollo lunar expeditions. Glenn's
award will be displayed at the John Glenn Institute of Public Service and
Public Policy in Columbus, Ohio.
Glenn was born in 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio. As a Marine aviator, he flew combat
missions during WW II and the Korean War. He was selected as one of the
original Mercury astronauts in April 1959. Glenn left the astronaut program in
1965, three years after he piloted the first U.S. orbital mission. He was
elected to the Senate in November 1974, where he served four terms until his
retirement in January 1999.
For Glenn's astronaut biography on the Web, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/bios/glennbio.html
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