25 thoughts on “John Glenn”

1. True hero and he deserves a good deal of respect. God speed!

2. He still holds the record for the shortest orbital flight (barely beating Carpenter). Interestingly, the Space Shuttle was designed to break that record, though it never did (with a single orbit to place spy satellites and get back down before being picked up on Soviet radars).

   1. Gagarin made one orbit.

      1. Crap. Can’t we somehow beat that Soviet record?

      2. I read somewhere that Gagarin’s ride wasn’t quite an orbi tin that he landed “short” of where he took off. Not sure where I read that nor if it’s actually true.

         1. He landed short because the earth had turned underneath him while he was up there. It was a full orbit.

            1. Does it still count as a full orbit since he had to do the deorbit burn before completing a full rev?

            2. I don’t know where he was when he did the burn, but he went all the way around in an inertial frame. The fact that he had to do a burn indicated that he was clearly in orbit, not a suborbit.

            3. ” The fact that he had to do a burn indicated that he was clearly in orbit, not a suborbit.”

               Not necessarily true. If you want to land shorter you do a burn even if you are sub orbital.

            4. No, but in this case, the fact remains that he had to do a burn to enter. He was in orbit. He went all the way around.

   2. Not until he’d been around three times, it didn’t.

      1. Gus Grissom just facepalmed. ^_^

   3. No, Gagarin does.

   4. Glenn’s Mercury flight was three full orbits, close to five hours, cut short from it’s planned seven orbits. Yuri Gagarin’s single orbit flight was only about an hour and a half.

      1. Don’t believe everything you see on “The Right Stuff”. The mission was always planned for three orbits. The references to “seven orbits” that appear early in the ground-to-orbit communications are about things that would be OK for seven orbits, if that were the plan, which it wasn’t.

3. Wow…

   He lived a good life but sad to see him go.

4. He strapped a fire cracker to his ass, but today people are such wimps they have to wait for govt. to tell them what their ‘rights’ are.

5. He and Alan Shepherd were always my heroes!

6. I was inspired by Alan Shepard’s takeoff. That set the agenda for my entire life. Glenn was less of a hero to me because of that, but not a minor hero.

7. He was the last, and oldest, of the first and now all of them are gone. God, I’m getting old.

   I am very distantly related to Glenn on my late mother’s side. She had relatives in Glenn’s birthplace of Cambridge, OH. My father was also a native Ohioan and Cambridge was a regular stop on family visits to relatives when I was a boy.

   Considering how few white people there were in Ohio when our respective family trees crossed in the early 19th Century, I suspect that a sizable fraction of the current population of Ohio is likely related at least as closely to Glenn as I am. Still, I was irrationally proud of my miniscule consanguinity anent Glenn when I was informed of this geneological circumstance shortly after his Mercury flight.

   Another tenuous family connection; like many other small-town Ohio boys, Glenn and my late father both went to Muskingum College, though their respective tenures there didn’t overlap. Both also served in World War 2, though on opposite sides of the planet.

   Ad astra, John. Semper Fi.

8. Sad day. Lost someone worthy of looking up to. Even Tom Wolfe’s somewhat caricature-ish treatment of Glenn cast Glenn as someone to be greatly admired.

   He “hung it out over the edge” countless times in war and in peace and helped advance the state of mankind.

   He’ll be missed.

   1. One of my former colleagues worked on Glenn’s cross-country record-setting flight (in an F-8); he said that Glenn was an even bigger asshole than Wolfe portrayed him. But, he was OUR kind of asshole…

9. High Flight

   Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
   And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
   Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
   Of sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred things
   You have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swung
   High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
   I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
   My eager craft through footless halls of air…
   Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
   I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
   Where never lark or even eagle flew —
   And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
   The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
   Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

   John Gillespie Magee, Jr

10. It will very soon (2017) be more years since the first Space Shuttle flight (1981) than it was from Glenn’s Mercury flight (1962) to his own flight on the Space Shuttle (STS-95 in 1998).

11. December 1998. I was working for Pete Conrad as his Washington, D.C. representative. Nancy Conrad rang me and asked if I could get a letter from her to John Glenn, asking him to be involved in something she was producing.

    No problem. This was, after all, part of my job.

    John Glenn had retired from the Senate and had been replaced by a Republican, George Voinovich, in the November 1998 election. I called Voinovich’s newly established Senate office in D.C., thinking they would have a fax number for Glenn, who I assumed had already decamped to Ohio.

    The Voinovich folks didn’t have a fax number for Glenn or any office of his, but they really really wanted to give me Glenn’s home address. (Payback?)

    Off I went to a Maryland suburb. I pulled up to a non-descript house in a residential neighborhood. Not a car anywhere in sight on the street, not a car parked anywhere. It looked like everyone was at their jobs. I parked in front of the house. This was about noon on a weekday.

    No car anywhere visible. No mailbox anywhere visible. Furthermore, there wasn’t any way to leave the letter in the door or the outer, storm door. There was not a crack to slide anything under and in to the house, or to put the letter in something so it would be noticed.

    What to do?

    On the off chance that, say, a maid or someone like that might be home, I ran the doorbell.

    John Glenn answered the door. He was dressed in gray sweat pants, a sweatshirt….and a pair of bunny slippers.

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