March 28, 2024

Thoughts on Space and Time

Rehoboth Ramblings

Posted

John Glenn was given a well-deserved hero’s farewell in his (and my) native Ohio after his death at age 95 in December. That evening I was looking up at the brightly shining moon and thinking of another astronaut, Neil Armstrong. How amazing that another boy from another small Ohio would grow up to be the first man to walk on the moon in “one giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969.

How brave and daring these and other astronauts were and are. Glenn, like other early astronauts, was a fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War, and a test pilot after. He continued flying until he was 90. So though he obviously took many risks in his life, he was not rash or foolhardy, not if he lived to be 95. Grace under pressure is how you would describe his manner.

People like me who are nervous flyers (especially if claustrophobic too) may be even more likely to stand in awe of astronauts like Glenn and Armstrong and all the others. The space missions were and are obviously dangerous. Just think of the Challenger disaster, for one. But even if everything ran smoothly, there you’d be, hurtling around space while confined to a tightly-packed metal tube. It takes a special kind of strong-willed person to cope with that. And those nerve-wracking space walks! I could hardly bear to watch them on the news.

My own brush with the U.S. space program was second-hand. My husband Bill had the good fortune to work on the Viking project, which marked the first Mars landing and the first photos taken of the Mars landscape some 40 years ago. In fact, we met in Colorado, where I was living for a few years in my 20’s and he was working out of Martin-Marietta in Denver, the contractor for the project. Bill was a team engineer on the project’s science team. The camera was designed by Itek and whenever problems arose as the camera was being built, he helped solve them.

The Viking craft successfully landed on Mars on July 20, 1976. I remember watching the Today Show to see the excitement at the Jet Propulsion Lab, where Bill was working at the time of the landing. Bill recalls that “the day after the landing, we got the first color picture and a group of four of us stood around and twiddled nobs until the picture looked right. That afternoon, after the picture of the Mars landscape had gone out to all the news services, team meteorologist Jim Pollack told us the color was wrong. We went back and made it look like Jim thought it should be, adjusting the color of the sky above Mars from bluish-white to reddish-orange.”

Bill recently was asked to take part in a documentary being filmed for the Smithsonian Channel in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Viking project. We don’t know when this program will be shown and I hope that Bill will be on screen for more than five minutes. I’ve seen enough of these documentaries to know how they interview people for hours and then often only use a few sound-bites from each participant, interspersed throughout the program.

But I’m proud of his participation in the filming, even though it required a hurried one-day trip to New York City right before Thanksgiving for the interview. I’ll also be happy to see something new on the Smithsonian Channel. It seems that every time I check, they are either featuring monster snakes or air disasters. Not exactly snakes on a plane, but snakes AND air disasters – the two things I least want to think about, let alone watch. I assume only people who never fly watch programs about air disasters.

But to return to praising John Glenn, he was the first American to orbit the earth in Feb. 1962 and later in life became the oldest person to go into space at the age of 77, when he flew on the Discovery Space Shuttle in 1998. His many awards and accomplishments as a pilot and astronaut are too long to list here.

Meanwhile, he also served ably as a Democratic senator from Ohio from 1974 to 1999. By all accounts, Glenn was not just a popular hero, but also an even-tempered, mature gentleman who was devoted to his wife for over 70 years. We have to wonder if we shall ever see his like again.

John Glenn also personified the words of President John F. Kennedy, who declared “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Summing up the hopeful outlook of that optimistic era, JFK delivered this stirring inaugural address 56 years ago this month. Yes, it does seem like a very long time ago now.

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