John Glenn felt he was destined to be an astronaut. He had been training his body and mind for this challenge all his life. But how could he make sure he would be chosen?
Quite a few things were working against him. For one thing, there was his age. The age cutoff for Mercury astronauts was thirty-nine. Glenn was already thirty-seven, just under the wire. Then there was the problem of his incomplete education. NASA requirements specifically said that all astronauts had to have a college degree.
Finally, there was Glenn’s size. Due to the tiny space inside the space capsule, no astronaut could be taller than five feet eleven inches—exactly Glenn’s height—or heavier than 180 pounds. And after a few years at a Navy desk job in Washington, D.C., Glenn was weighing in at a hefty 208.
He set out to get in shape. With Tom Miller at his side, he jogged, lifted weights, swam, and dieted. In short order, he was down to 178 pounds.
The education requirement was harder to meet, though. Even after Glenn had transferred all the credits for the math and aerodynamics courses he’d taken over the years, Muskingum still would not grant him a degree. College administrators pointed out that he had not even lived in New Concord for the past seventeen years.
NASA winnowed the list down to eighty-eight candidates, all pilots who were used to putting their lives on the line every day. Glenn was still on the list. But not for long. Though he didn’t know it at the time, his lack of a degree disqualified him. Later Glenn found out that his old commanding officer at the Naval Air Test Center had taken all of his records and qualifications over to NASA and argued his case. Thanks to that officer, Glenn was back in the running.
Now NASA was down to thirty-two candidates.
The lucky few were summoned to Lovelace Medical Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for medical tests. Glenn was told that he and his fellow candidates would be subject to the most complete medical tests ever given to any human being. Soon he decided this was no exaggeration.
For eight days Glenn and the others were pushed, prodded, and poked. He was turned upside down and practically inside out. He had blood tests, urine tests, bowel tests, eye and ear tests, tests that measured the contents of his stomach, and tests that probed the contents of his mind. “Wires and tubes dangled from us like tentacles from a jellyfish,” Glenn said later. “Nobody wanted to tell us what some of the stranger tests were for.”
Once, for instance, the doctors plunged a big needle attached to an electrical wire into the base of his thumb. Then they pressed a button. His hand started opening and closing automatically, faster and faster. What was the point of the test? Glenn never could figure it out.
Next, all candidates went over to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for psychological testing. The object here was to see how much physical and mental stress they could endure before they became jittery—or totally freaked out.
First Glenn took the usual stress tests, like running on a treadmill to measure his heart rate and body temperature. Then came other, more unusual tests.
They poured cold water in his ears to see whether he’d become dizzy and disoriented.
They strapped him to a chair that shook him like a human milkshake.
They placed him in a pressure chamber wearing an oxygen mask and a partial pressure suit and told him to breathe. Meanwhile, the air was gradually drawn out of the room. In-out, in-out, Glenn told himself, concentrating on each breath. His chest began to feel as though an elephant were sitting on it. But he forced himself to continue until the test was over.
One machine, called the “idiot box,” tested reaction time. Glenn sat in front of an instrument panel with blinking lights and noisy beepers. He was told to push buttons and pull levers in a certain order to make the flashing, beeping, and buzzing stop. And then all the lights and beepers started going off at once! He tried to concentrate on the task without losing his cool. If he showed frustration, he knew he’d be out of the program.
One day, Glenn was led into an “isolation chamber”—a pitch-black, soundproof room—and left sitting in front of a desk. No one told him how long he’d be there. Glenn reached into the desk for a pad and into his pocket for a pencil. Then, although he couldn’t see a thing, he started to write, keeping his place by tracking each line with his finger. While sitting there in the dark, he wrote lists of things to do.
Then he started writing poetry. As soon as he finished one line, he had to memorize it before he could move on to the next. The poem was about each person’s responsibility to use his or her “unborn talents” to make the world a better place.
After three hours, the door finally opened and Glenn walked out into the bright light.
One test made Glenn glad he’d worked so hard to get into top physical shape. He had to puff into a tube that blew air under a column of mercury. The challenge was to keep the mercury level up through sheer lung power. Until then, the longest anyone had been able to hold the column up was 91 seconds.
Glenn blew slowly but steadily, willing himself to hold his breath as the clock ticked. Sixty seconds . . . 90 . . . 120 . . . 130 seconds. He had beaten the record by 59 seconds!
Yet Glenn wasn’t actually the champion. That honor went to Scott Carpenter, a handsome Navy Air Force pilot. Carpenter kept the mercury up for 171 seconds! Glenn looked at Carpenter with respect. That guy must be incredibly fit, he figured.
Finally the tests were completed and the applicants went home to wait and worry. On April 6, Glenn got a call from Charles Donlan, the deputy director of NASA. He crossed his fingers.
“Congratulations,” he heard Donlan say. “You’ve made it.”