NASA is planning to launch its newest spacecraft, called Starliner on Saturday, if all goes well. The gumdrop shaped vehicle is sitting on top of an Alabama built Atlas-V rocket. Engineers have been troubleshooting a helium leak on one of the Starliner’s jet thrusters. The launch is a test flight for the new vehicle, and is supposed to include a docking with the International Space Station. The mission is also notable because no astronauts have ever flown on an Alabama built Atlas-V. This type of rocket was reserved, in the past, only for unmanned payloads like satellites and deep space probes. No astronauts have flown on rockets of this type since Project Gemini in the 1960’s that paved the way for the Apollo manned moon landings. John Glenn was one.
America’s first astronauts were familiar with riding on rockets that weren’t designed to carry people. The Mercury seven included U.S. space pioneers like Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. The Redstone rockets they flew, with their one-seater space capsules, didn’t make it to Earth orbit. The first astronaut to do that was John Glenn, who flew an earlier version of the Atlas rocket, which was the ancestor of the Alabama Atlas-V set to carry Starliner. I spoke with the late astronaut and U.S. Senator in 1987 for the twenty fifth anniversary of his flight in orbit aboard the space capsule called “Friendship 7.” Back then, he recalled not being thrilled about riding an Atlas.
“…because at that time, we had witnessed several Atlas failures (explosions.) And, I think they were on about the 42nd or 45th Atlas flight at that time, something like that. And they had worked out a series of flights to prove to what we called Man rate the vehicle in other words, make it safe enough that we will be wanting to put a human on board,” said Glenn. “And that was the that set us back a little bit in the program while we waited for that to occur. But the Redstone (the rockets used on suborbital flights by astronauts Shepard and Grissom) did not have the capability of putting anyone into orbit, it could not lift that much weight and get it up to that kind of speed. The Atlas was the only vehicle we had that could do that. So, our spacecraft had to be designed to fit within the weight limitations that the Atlas had to put something into orbit and that's the reason it was a small vehicle and, and the weight wasn't as large as the Soviets put up.”
The Atlas rocket Glenn used on the Friendship 7 orbital mission was originally designed to carry nuclear warheads. The astronaut observed that advanced technology in the United States at that time worked against NASA when the agency started planning to put people into orbit.
“Our technology was such that we could design a fairly small warhead and so didn't need a big booster,” Glenn observed during our 1987 talk. “The Soviets on the other hand, had their design was not as good as ours, they needed a much larger booster to get their much larger bomb design up. Later on, and years after that, then here we decided to start a Man program and they had a big booster available and we only had a small one so we could only get up some 3900 pounds I think it was into into orbit. Starting out and then coming back was much lighter than that at the end of the flight course. But so we were very limited in what we could do with our spacecraft because we had been superior technologically in another area late earlier on.
Glenn spoke with me from his office as a U.S. Senator. He said even though it was twenty five years since his flight during Project Mercury, he was reminded of it almost daily by people he encountered on Capitol Hill.
“That flight remains so vivid and was so etched in my memory to begin with, I guess it seems to me like was a couple of months ago and I have to really stretch my imagination to believe it really was 25 years ago,” Glenn recalled. “But I guess it is we have to face the facts so that's that yes, they do. And, it's a rare day that someone doesn't bring up something that happened in the program. And while I've been a senator here for 12 years, that the astronaut background still comes up quite often not as much maybe as it did some years ago, but it still comes up all the time.”
Glenn’s phone booth sized Mercury capsule was later replaced by the two-man Gemini spacecraft, and the three person Apollo. The space shuttle later replaced capsules to carry crews of up to eight astronauts. Glenn mentioned that anytime he wanted to recall his first ever orbital flight, all it took was a stroll at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian.
“If you look in my small spacecraft, the Friendship Seven, over in the Smithsonian, you see little miniatures of the doctor’s eyecharts on the panel,” said Glenn in our 1987 interview. “That indicates that we were trying to determine whether in the weightlessness in space over several hours of flight, whether your ability to see things or not was going to change… whether your eye changed shape because it no longer had to be supported by the muscle structure under the eye. And, those little astigmatism measuring wheels with the spokes that you have in the doctor's office in the miniatures, miniature charts with the little letters on them of different sizes. I was to read those every 20 minutes during flight to see if there are any changes in eyesight and other thing we some of the doctors were concerned about was whether we would have uncontrollable nausea when fluids in the inner ear could just floated around at random in the weightlessness of space. And would this give you uncontrollable nausea so I had all sorts of motion sickness pills in a injection system that I could take if I had to make an emergency reentry because of that. So what we were trying to determine was whether man was a viable part of a spacecraft system and could do research in space. And today, though, and in contrast to that, of course, those fears are way behind us.”
Glenn would later join the crew of space shuttle Discovery on the STS-95 mission. He was seventy seven years old which made him, at that time, the oldest person ever to fly in Earth orbit. Media coverage was skeptical about this final flight for the Mercury pioneer. But, Glenn’s mission was considered a “good news” story and, his launch was cheered on by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
