NASA hoped to schedule the first orbital flight before Christmas. That gave Glenn less than a month to get ready.
One of his first tasks was to decide on a name for his capsule. He turned the job over to his children. Together, Dave and Lyn wrote up a list of possibilities: Columbia, Endeavor, America, Magellan, We, Hope. Their first choice, though, was Friendship.
Perfect, Glenn thought. Friendship 7 it would be. He asked the NASA artist to paint the name on the side of the capsule in script letters, right next to the picture of an American flag.
At first Glenn kept to his regular routine, training in the simulator and running two miles each day on the sand. He and Scott Carpenter sometimes drove into nearby Cocoa Beach to have dinner at a Polynesian restaurant. But as the excitement grew, Glenn began to be trailed by groups of reporters. They even followed him to church on Sundays. Eventually he decided to go into isolation. He felt he needed complete concentration for the task ahead.
John and Scott moved into the crew quarters at Hangar S on the Cape. Staying away from other people, Glenn hoped, would keep him from catching the flu or a winter cold. The owner of a nearby motel, Henri Landwirth, sent them regular “care packages” of delicious food. Glenn especially loved the shrimp with hot sauce and black bread.
Scott came and went, but John stayed close to base. Friends started to send him mock get-well cards. “Sorry to hear about your long confinement,” one read.
One night Henri called to invite him to his home for dinner. Why not? Glenn thought. He hadn’t been off the base for weeks. He looked forward to a relaxed evening with good food.
The evening was a success, but the next morning Henri called again. “I hope you’ve had the mumps,” he said, opening the conversation. His daughter, he reported, had just come down with them.
The mumps! No, Glenn never had had them. A week later, he woke up with a sore neck and began to panic. Surely, it couldn’t be . . . Luckily, it turned out that Glenn had merely strained his neck muscles the day before.
As December 20 neared, NASA decided to scrap the pre-Christmas launch. A new date of January 16 was set, and Glenn went home to Arlington, Virginia, for the holidays.
One afternoon, John, Annie, and the kids went to snowy Great Falls, Virginia, for a winter cookout. As they sat on the rocks and listened to the sound of the falling water, fifteen-year-old Lyn raised a subject they had all been thinking about. “What kinds of things could happen to you, Dad?”
Glenn knew she was talking about a possible accident, or even death. All the astronauts knew that there were risks, he told his family. But everyone on Project Mercury had worked hard to minimize them.
“If I believed something was likely to happen,” he told Lyn and Dave, “I wouldn’t want to go, and NASA wouldn’t send me in the first place. But if anything did happen to go wrong, I don’t want you to blame anybody, okay? Not NASA, not anybody. I’m doing something I really want to do because it’s important for our whole country. And it’s something we should keep doing, so don’t let anybody tell you we should stop trying to get into space.”
After the first of the year, the flight was delayed again and again because of bad weather. January 16 came and went, and a new date of January 23 was set—and then canceled. On January 27, Glenn spent six hours in the capsule waiting for liftoff. It never came. Tired and discouraged, he went back to Hangar S.
There he was met by a group of NASA officials. Could he give Annie a call? they asked. The matter was urgent.
Annie, Glenn knew, was under siege back in Arlington. Reporters were camped out on her front lawn, waiting for a glimpse of the astronaut’s brave wife and children. Luckily, the exclusive Life contract protected her from actually having to talk with anyone but Life reporter Loudon Wainwright. Annie’s stutter was still quite bad, and the thought of having to give a press conference made her very nervous.
So John called Annie and she explained the situation. Vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson was parked in a limousine just a block away from the house, waiting to invade with a slew of television reporters. He wanted to console Annie for the delayed flight. The interview was to be broadcast on national TV. Not only that, but Johnson had also demanded that Life reporter Wainwright leave the house so the other reporters could get their chance.
She didn’t want to meet with Johnson, Annie told her husband. It had been a very long day and she had a headache.
Glenn promptly came to her rescue. “Look, if you don’t want the vice-president or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that’s it as far as I’m concerned. They are not coming in—and I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent!”
The NASA officials were very unhappy. A mere astronaut and his wife had dared to defy the Vice President of the United States! One official told Glenn to his face that if he didn’t cooperate, he could be replaced. When he heard the threat, Glenn said afterward, he “saw red.”
Fine, Glenn said deliberately. NASA could go ahead and dismiss him and announce it on national TV. Then Glenn could have his own press conference and tell his side of the story. In the meantime, he said, he had to go take a shower.
Glenn walked off down the hall. He never heard another word about the incident.
The launch date was pushed forward again. President Kennedy invited Glenn to come to the White House to explain the mission to him. With the help of models and blueprints, Glenn took the fascinated president through the flight, step by step.
By now, everyone was jittery. One of the most impatient was Glenn’s friend Henri Landwirth. He had baked the world’s largest cake—900 pounds!—to celebrate the flight. He had stored the cake, which looked just like Friendship 7, in an air-conditioned truck to keep it from spoiling.
Finally the next launch date dawned—February 20. Glenn woke at 1:30 A.M., suited up, and was strapped into the capsule couch. The procedure was extremely familiar by now—he’d been through it four times before.
The countdown began, then stopped. It looked as if the clouds were thinning off the Cape. Glenn took advantage of the delay to call his family. They were watching the launch on television back in Arlington.
“Hey, honey,” Glenn said to Annie as he had so many times before. “Don’t be scared. Remember, I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
“Don’t be long,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.
“I’ll talk to you after I land this afternoon,” he promised her. The countdown started again.
Outside the capsule, the clouds scattered. It was turning into a beautiful day, with a brilliant blue sky. The clock clicked steadily forward.
At 9:47 A.M., the count reached zero.
“Ignition!” called the countdown person in Mission Control.
Glenn could feel a deep rumble as the engines started up far beneath him. The Atlas belched flame and smoke.
“Liftoff!” the voice cried again.
Glenn felt a very definite sensation of “up and away.” This, then, was it. The moment he had been waiting for . . .
Over the headset came Scott Carpenter’s muffled message: “Godspeed, John Glenn.”