- Chaikin, Andrew.
John Glenn: America's Astronaut.
Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2014.
ISBN 978-1-58834-486-1.
-
This short book (around 126 pages print equivalent), available
only for the Kindle as a “Kindle single” at a modest
price, chronicles the life and space missions of the first
American to orbit the Earth. John Glenn grew up in a small Ohio
town, the son of a plumber, and matured during the first
great depression. His course in life was set when, in 1929, his
father took his eight year old son on a joy ride offered by a
pilot at local airfield in a Waco biplane. After that, Glenn
filled up his room with model airplanes, intently followed news of
air racers and pioneers of exploration by air, and in 1938
attended the Cleveland Air Races. There seemed little hope of
his achieving his dream of becoming an airman himself: pilot
training was expensive, and his family, while making ends meet
during the depression, couldn't afford such a luxury.
With the war in Europe underway and the U.S. beginning to rearm
and prepare for possible hostilities, Glenn heard of a government program,
the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which would pay for his
flying lessons and give him college credit for taking them. He
entered the program immediately and received his pilot's
license in May 1942. By then, the world was a very
different place. Glenn dropped out of college in his junior
year and applied for the Army Air Corps. When they dawdled
accepting him, he volunteered for the Navy, which immediately
sent him to flight school. After completing advanced flight
training, he transferred to the Marine Corps, which was
seeking aviators.
Sent to the South Pacific theatre, he flew 59 combat missions,
mostly in close air support of ground troops in which
Marine pilots specialise. With the end of the war, he decided
to make the Marines his career and rotated through a number
of stateside posts. After the outbreak of the Korean War, he
hoped to see action in the jet combat emerging there and in 1953
arrived in country, again flying close air support. But an
exchange program with the Air Force finally allowed him to
achieve his ambition of engaging in air to air combat at ten
miles a minute. He completed 90 combat missions in Korea, and
emerged as one of the Marine Corps' most distinguished pilots.
Glenn parlayed his combat record into a test pilot position,
which allowed him to fly the newest and hottest aircraft of
the Navy and Marines. When NASA went looking for pilots for its
Mercury manned spaceflight program, Glenn was naturally near
the top of the list, and was among the 110 military test pilots
invited to the top secret briefing about the project. Despite
not meeting all of the formal selection criteria (he lacked a
college degree), he performed superbly in all of the harrowing
tests to which candidates were subjected, made cut after cut, and
was among the seven selected to be the first astronauts.
This book, with copious illustrations and two embedded videos,
chronicles Glenn's career, his harrowing first flight into
space, his 1998 return to space on Space Shuttle
Discovery on
STS-95, and his
24 year stint in the U.S. Senate. I found the picture of Glenn
after his pioneering flight somewhat airbrushed. It is said that
while in the Senate, “He was known as one of NASA's
strongest supporters on Capitol Hill…”, and
yet in fact, while not one of the rabid Democrats who tried
to kill NASA like Walter Mondale, he did not speak out as
an advocate for a more aggressive space program aimed at
expanding the human presence in space. His return to space
is presented as the result of his assiduously promoting
the benefits of space research for gerontology rather than
a political junket by a senator which would generate
publicity for NASA at a time when many people had tuned
out its routine missions. (And if there was so much to be
learned by flying elderly people in space, why was it never
done again?)
John Glenn was a quintessential product of the old, tough America. A
hero in two wars, test pilot when that was one of the most risky
of occupations, and first to ride the thin-skinned pressure-stabilised
Atlas rocket into orbit, his place in history is assured. His
subsequent career as a politician was not particularly distinguished:
he initiated few pieces of significant legislation and never
became a figure on the national stage. His campaign for the 1984
Democratic presidential nomination went nowhere, and he was implicated
in the
“Keating Five”
scandal. John Glenn accomplished enough in the first forty-five
years of his life to earn him a secure place in American history.
This book does an excellent job of recounting those events and
placing them in the context of the time. If it goes a bit too far
in lionising his subsequent career, that's understandable: a biographer
shouldn't always succumb to balance when dealing with a hero.
April 2014 