77 and Weightless: John Glenn Returns to Space
On October 29, 1998, 77-year-old John Glenn rode the shuttle Discovery back into orbit, 36 years after he became the first American to circle the Earth.
At 2:19 on the afternoon of October 29, 1998, the space shuttle Discovery thundered off Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center — and aboard it, strapped into a seat he'd waited 36 years to occupy again, was a 77-year-old United States senator named John Glenn.
Glenn needed no introduction. On February 20, 1962, as a Marine pilot in NASA's Mercury program, he had become the first American to orbit the Earth, circling the planet three times in Friendship 7 while the country held its breath. He'd left NASA, served four terms in the U.S. Senate — and then, in his seventies, started lobbying for one more flight.
NASA said yes, and the reason was science as much as sentiment. Researchers wanted to study how an older body responds to weightlessness: if the frailties of aging resemble the effects of microgravity, as some scientists suspected, then a healthy 77-year-old in orbit was a walking laboratory. Glenn flew as a payload specialist, the subject of sleep studies, protein experiments, and balance tests.
A quarter of a million people lined the Florida beaches and causeways to watch him go. Seconds after liftoff, a small panel fell from the shuttle's tail — alarming to watch, harmless in the end. From orbit, Glenn radioed down the same words he'd used in 1962: 'Zero-g and I feel fine.' Fellow Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, who had wished him 'Godspeed, John Glenn' before that first flight, recorded the message again for the second.
Discovery carried seven astronauts, including Spain's first spacefarer, Pedro Duque, and veteran Japanese astronaut Chiaki Mukai. Over nine days the crew ran more than 80 experiments, deployed and retrieved a satellite studying the solar wind, and tested equipment bound for the Hubble Space Telescope. On November 7, Discovery glided home to Florida.
At 77, Glenn became the oldest person ever to fly in space — and he remains the oldest person ever to reach Earth orbit. (Older suborbital tourists have since flown higher arcs, but none has circled the planet.) Critics called the flight a joyride for a popular senator. Glenn had a simpler answer: he'd bumped into an elderly couple in an airport who told him his flight had inspired them to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If a 77-year-old could go to space, he liked to say, then growing older didn't have to mean standing still.
Photo: The seven-member crew of STS-95 in their flight suits, with 77-year-old John Glenn at back right — NASA, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
