The story of Glenn's heroic return to orbit, including his preparation, the shuttle's transmissions from space, and the landing.
From Chapter Five: Originally, the first astronauts were going to be chosen from the expanse of civilian America. The scientists at NASA were looking for daredevils and brave hearts, and they didn't care where they came from. A leader of the search team said that cliff climbers, scuba divers, recreational parachutists, and "people who went in for stressful sports" would be encouraged to apply. Near the end of 1958, with NASA just a couple of months old, the selection group drafted an announcement seeking applicants for the civil service position of research astronaut. The notice included a job description, an annual pay scale of between $8,330 and $12,770 depending on experience, and a requirement that some reputable organization sponsor every candidate. NASA wanted to avoid independent thrill seekers who lived too far out on the edge. Bravery was critical, but they didn't want courage teetering on the cusp of crazy. The applicants would have to show they had a record of accepting hazardous duty willingly, of tolerating severe environmental conditions, and of reacting well in stressful situations. Part of the announcement NASA planned to distribute said: "These three characteristics may have been demonstrated in connection with certain professional occupations such as test pilot, crew member of experimental submarine, or arctic or antarctic explorer."
But in late December, all that was scrapped. The announcement never left NASA's offices. President Eisenhower, who had insisted the space program be a civilian enterprise, abruptly decreed over the Christmas holiday that only military pilots would be considered for the civilian space agency's first big program, Project Mercury.
"It happened that President Eisenhower didn't like the idea of having a nationwide screening process for astronauts," said Charles Donlan, who was deputy director of Project Mercury and led the search for astronauts. "He thought the program was probably going to go away after the excitement of Sputnik so he vetoed that wide-scale attempt to screen astronauts and said, 'Take them from the files of the Defense Department. Take them from the graduates of the flying schools. . . . '"
Well, this certainly made things easier. NASA put together a list of minimum requirements from height to weight to flying hours, and they whittled the military pilot "files" from 508 to 110.
John Glenn's name was among them, but on paper he had a couple of problems. He still lacked a bachelor's degree -- a minimum requirement -- and at age 37 was only three years from the top of NASA's age bracket. He also may have been a little too tall. Today Glenn dismisses this story as silly, but his buddy Tom Miller swears that as NASA was weeding through its applications, pulling out everyone taller than 5' 11," Glenn was stacking books on his head to compress his spine.
"Well, he learned to scooch down. On his medical record, I'm almost positive of this, I can't remember seeing the record but I think he was listed as 6 foot," Miller said. "In fact, he used to mark a place on one of the wall facings . . . to see how far he could get below it. If you ask him about that today, he'd probably deny it."
With his background in test flying, his exemplary record in combat and his lengthy experience with jets, Glenn overcame his academic deficiency and made the paper cut. He was one of only five Marines among that 110.
And then fate gave him a nudge. To make the process easier to manage, Donlan randomly divided the 110 names into three groups and invited groups one and two -- roughly 70 pilots -- to Washington for interviews in early 1959. These individual meetings with the pilots not only gave Donlan and his crew a chance to begin sizing everybody up, but it also did the same for the pilots. Only basic information was known about the call for astronauts, so NASA's people needed to outline the nature of Project Mercury in case any of the qualified pilots didn't want to volunteer. And some didn't. Heading off to join a fledgling space program for the chance to follow a monkey into orbit didn't look like a brilliant career move to everybody, especially among a group of young officers with bright military futures in front of them. And it was around this time that a group of experimental aircraft pilots began mocking the job astronauts could really do in a floating space capsule by saying they'd be nothing more than "spam in a can." So by March, the group of 70 pilots had dropped to 36, either because they quit or were eliminated. (Six had actually grown too tall.) Still, Donlan thought this gave him a large enough pool to select a final set of astronauts, so he never even interviewed the last group of pilots.
Fate's push, or maybe dumb luck, was all that had put Glenn in with the pilots that met Donlan instead of in the group that never did. Glenn's Presbyterian faith fortified him throughout his life for moments like this by investing him with the belief that if he just did his part, then fate would do the rest. He called it the "50-50 proposition," and here again, he had done his part and so had fate. Which meant it was his turn once more to deliver. Now, becoming an astronaut was simply a matter of being better, of being exceptional among those delivered by fate or luck or a "higher power," as Glenn called it, to Donlan's office for consideration.
And so he did. He began making an impression instantly. The pilots had been told that Project Mercury was a civilian program, so they should just relax and wear street clothes for the preliminary interview. But that was too pedestrian for Glenn.
"I remember John Glenn first came into my office for the initial interview in his Marine uniform," Donlan remembered. "And he had a brown envelope under his arm."
An envelope? Nobody else brought a folder. Donlan asked what he was carrying.
Centrifuge runs, Glenn told him.
In the brown envelope, Glenn carried the data on high-G centrifuge runs that he had amassed for the Langley researchers when they sent him to Johnsville just a year or so earlier. Glenn explained that he knew NASA was worried about the heavy strain of reentry, and he just wanted the astronaut selection people to know he had been involved in early research on the topic.
"He was the only one who had material like that," Donlan said. "In fact, Glenn was the only one, after seeing the drawings that I had of the Mercury [capsule], who asked if he could come back that evening and pore over them.
"Those are the kinds of things that we looked for. The dedication to the program."
The selection course that followed for Glenn and the other astronaut candidates in the group of 36 was rigorous almost to the point of comedy. Scientists had utterly no idea what space would do to the human body, so they devised a battery of physical and psychological tests that stretched the imagination. At Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and a laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the candidates were pummeled with tests. Wright-Patterson and its doctors played a large role because this was where the Air Force housed its space program, called Man In Space Soonest (MISS), which had been making progress on the topic before being closed down to put full military support behind Mercury. During the exams, ice water was poured into their ears to disrupt balance and they were locked in silent, lightless chambers for hours on end.
"We went through heat chambers up there where they heated your body up until your core body temperature got up to a point where they thought it was dangerous to go beyond. . . . " Glenn told a space and medicine symposium in Washington, DC, last May. "We went through sound chambers where the frequency and amplitude were varied to the point where it'd make your whole body shake, literally."
Donlan said, "I viewed it as these medical people finally had a batch of top-notch guys, and they kind of used it as a research program of theirs to see how normal people behaved in some of these odd tests they gave them."
Glenn viewed it as a hurdle. Using the tenacity he had displayed so well in getting the Navy to let him fly for a transcontinental speed record in 1957, Glenn marched through the physical and psychological examinations.
The exams were so thorough and so imaginative that when Dr. Randolph Lovelace -- who as chairman of the NASA life sciences committee had led the team of doctors -- was introduced at the press conference naming the Mercury Seven, his first words to reporters were, "I just hope they never give me a physical examination."
That day was April 9, 1959. The group of 36 had been whittled to 7, which actually was a bit of a compromise. The early plan was to choose 12 but Donlan thought that was too many. They weren't planning 12 flights, so why train a bunch of extras who would never get in the game?
So they picked 7: Malcolm "Scott" Carpenter, 33; Leroy "Gordon" Cooper, 32; John H. Glenn, Jr., 37; Virgil "Gus" Grissom, 33; Walter Schirra, Jr., 35; Alan Shepard, 35; and Donald "Deke" Slayton, 35.
