Let’s do the John Glenn Twist! Yeah! Oh!
Round and Round and a-round
Three times around the world he goes,
Up in space, Orbitin’ in space
And the whole wide world knows. Knows.
—RIO DE FRANCISCO, “THE JOHN GLENN TWIST,” 1962
Within sixteen days of Gus Grissom’s triumphant flight on July 21, 1961, Kennedy was faced with the unwelcome obligation of congratulating Khrushchev on yet another manned launch, one that represented a striking advance in space exploration. The president was staying with his wife and two children at their home on Cape Cod for a long-planned weekend of sailing and relaxing along the sun-drenched beaches. Due to Soviet military maneuvers in Berlin and CIA-intercepted rumors about new Soviet space activities, it turned into a working vacation. Rather than invite old friends to Hyannis Port, JFK asked Adlai Stevenson to be his guest. Now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the two-time Democratic presidential nominee stayed in one of the white clapboard guesthouses in the Kennedy compound.
It was a maddening weekend. Kennedy’s forebodings about the international situation were correct. Late on Saturday night, August 5, U.S. intelligence informed him that the countdown had begun for a Soviet rocket launch. Before the exact nature of this latest Vostok mission was fully known, the president was made aware by the CIA that it was due to lift off at about 2:00 a.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) on Sunday, August 6. Going to bed early, JFK expected the Soviet space mission to be over by the time he woke up. So great was the technological leap of the spaceflight, however, that it was still under way and going strong the next morning. Kennedy pondered his options for a fitting American response. Stevenson recalled the president as being composed and alert, but stewing—constantly running his fingers through his tousled hair in frustration with the rising stakes for the space game between the United States and the Soviets, and disheartened that his Cape Cod downtime had been snatched away.
Gus Grissom’s flight had been suborbital, lasting barely fifteen minutes. The full-orbiting Vostok 2, by contrast, broke every record on the books. Just four months earlier, Gagarin had circled Earth once and made history. One can imagine hearts at NASA sinking as Vostok 2 cruised past that mark, then past the three orbits that many Soviet scientists believed to be the absolute limit of human endurance in space, then past five, then ten. Eventually, Vostok 2 made an astonishing 17.5 orbits of Earth in just over a day’s time.
The cosmonaut piloting the Vostok 2 was Gherman Titov, an expert skier and gymnast who, at twenty-five, was the youngest person ever to fly in space. Always pushing the “edge of the envelope” as a test pilot he was also the first person ever to nap in space, a feat that seemed extraordinary to a generation still wide-eyed by the thought of spaceflight. Titov actually slept for thirty minutes during the flight. With life-support equipment and radio and television devices monitoring his condition, his mission proved that astronauts or cosmonauts no longer had to operate on an anxiety-ridden red alert; they could relax, live, work, and sleep in space, suffering little more than the space version of motion sickness. In fact, sometime during his thirteenth orbit, Titov, after a fitful start to slumber, became so comfortable that he overslept his nap. This fact brought many smiles at the secret Star City, outside Moscow, where Soviet cosmonauts trained, lived with their families, and benefited from village school facilities and a shopping district.
Piloting Vostok 2 personally—unlike the previous “man-in-a-can” flights, controlled from Earth—Titov still had time to snap photographs from his cockpit. He also used a Konvas-Avtomat movie camera to film Earth for ten glorious minutes before reentry. Ejecting once his capsule had pierced the atmosphere on return, he parachuted to a landing near Krasny Kut, Saratov Oblast, six hundred miles southeast of Moscow. Having fulfilled the Soviet dream, an unqualified winner, he was then driven three miles to where his capsule had made a hard-impact landing, to recover his film and journal.
Titov became a hero as excitement electrified the USSR, his name uttered with reverence across the land. In the United States, by contrast, the cosmonaut was perceived as just another dastardly Communist spoiler. Members of Kennedy’s inner circle, especially Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Ted Sorensen, privately fumed to Webb that NASA should have given their boss advance notice of the Titov mission. What astonished NASA officials was that Vostok 2 had achieved goals they had earmarked for their sixth and last Mercury mission, still four flights down the list. The gap between the U.S. and Soviet space programs had grown, not shrunk.
Vostok 2 was a serious concern for Kennedy that weekend at Hyannis Port, but it wasn’t the only one. In light of a heavy migration of people from East Germany to the capitalist-democratic enclave of West Berlin, the Soviet Union was making increasingly firm demands that the isolated city be reunited with the Communist nation that fully surrounded it. Sweeping aside NATO objections regarding Berlin as ludicrous, Khrushchev increased ground troops in East Germany, boosted Kremlin military spending by a third, accelerated the Soviet space program, and ratcheted up his rhetoric on Soviet nuclear superiority. In Moscow, the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR had unleashed inflammatory ultimatums at America.
Over that very weekend, while Kennedy awaited reports at his Cape Cod home, negotiators from Britain, France, and the United States were engaged in high-level talks in Paris, determined to fashion a coordinated response to Khrushchev’s insistence on a unified Communist Berlin. Refusing to buckle under Kremlin pressure and determined to protect Western interests in the divided city, Kennedy made a highly visible show of American military preparations in West Germany. Aides worried that the Berlin confrontation might turn the Cold War into a shooting war in Europe, perhaps even a nuclear war. However, even during the crisis, Kennedy continued pursuing U.S.-Soviet cooperation, seeking a nuclear test ban treaty, engagement in space, and a global agreement on the use of communication satellites, which was opposed by the USSR.
While the many levels of U.S.-Soviet relations intensified the significance of Kennedy’s response to the space news, Titov’s flight and the Berlin crisis converged in public discourse. At the same time as the Pittsburgh Press fretted over the Berlin crisis under the headline “East Germans Fleeing Reds One a Minute,” astronomers at the city’s Allegheny Observatory used high-powered telescopes to catch vivid glimpses of Vostok 2 passing overhead, appearing as “a very bright star.” In Charleston, South Carolina, one newsman reported that Vostok 2 “looked about the size of a marble.” Other commentators were more damning. “You can guess which country appears to be struggling,” said Sir Bernard Lovell, one of Britain’s leading astronomers, “and it is certainly not Russia.” His counterpart in France, Professor Alexandre Ananov of the Astronautic Society, agreed. “I fear,” he said, “the lag can never be made up.” And one Taiwanese official opined, “It is obvious that Khrushchev was going to use the space flight as a weapon intended to intimidate the West on the Berlin issue.”
Choosing to play it cool, a steadfast Kennedy refused to acknowledge publicly that Khrushchev was using space exploration for geopolitical intimidation in Europe. His eventual response, delivered secondhand via Adlai Stevenson on Sunday afternoon, consisted only of a bland statement of “admiration” for Vostok 2, attached to the polite hope that Titov was in good health. Hours passed, then days, and Kennedy wouldn’t elaborate further on the mission. Behind the scenes, he officially instructed NASA to readjust its schedule and speed up the next Mercury launch.
Khrushchev, however, had plenty to say. Striking while the iron was hot, the Soviet premier delivered a blistering ninety-minute monologue broadcast live to his own nation, but intended for the entire world. In it, he angrily blamed Kennedy and the “degenerate” American political system for taking an aggressive stance regarding West Berlin. Hoping to intimidate JFK, Khrushchev gave an extended description of the nuclear war that would ensue if the United States were not more careful with its routine Cold War “threats.” If a war started over Berlin, Khrushchev promised with visceral antipathy, then the USSR would “strike a crushing blow” against the American homeland. It seemed clear that, from the Kremlin’s perspective, Titov’s triumph was more about the Cold War politics of divided Berlin than about space exploration. Close to home, former secretary of state Dean Acheson saw Khrushchev’s démarche less as a comment on Berlin or outer space than as an attempt to shatter America’s will to resist, while upending U.S. power and global influence by forcing a backdown in Europe and Asia.
With or without Vostok 2 and Kremlin bullying, Kennedy stood fast to his commitment that West Berlin would remain free and independent of East Germany. The Potsdam Conference of 1945—in which three of the wartime Allies (the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain) agreed that people could move freely in any sector of Berlin—was in the U.S. president’s favor, and most UN member countries backed America’s position. East Germany, though, was alarmed by the exodus of professionals, intellectuals, and skilled laborers migrating from East to West, which by August 1961 had reached an average of two thousand per day, principally through West Berlin. Fearing the costs to its economy, on August 13, East Germany began erecting a twenty-seven-mile-long barbed-wire fence dividing socialist East Berlin from the democratic western part of the city. Dubbed an “antifascist protection rampart” by the East and the “Berlin Wall” by the West, it went up unannounced, and over the weeks that followed, it was reinforced by concrete, guard towers, and other fortifications. This alarming, provocative development outraged Kennedy, but since West Berlin still remained in Western hands, he didn’t overreact. Within a few weeks, the crisis had quieted down. “It’s not a very nice solution,” the president said, “but the wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
That was true enough. But Khrushchev wasn’t done with his heavy-fisted attempt to intimidate the United States. For the Berlin crisis of August 1961 led immediately into yet another confrontation with the Soviet Union, this time over nuclear testing, an issue that was tied directly to the space race. Kennedy had learned firsthand how the Soviet space program had been used by Khrushchev as a diplomatic and near-military tool at the height of the Berlin crisis. No longer could manned space be compartmentalized as a benign scientific adventure in the cosmos; it was the Cold War.
AT NASA, THE methodical process of putting a human on the moon within ten years had received a prod from Vostok 2, because nothing motivates a bureaucracy like wounded pride. Reorganizing to better manage the agency’s various missions, James Webb established four program offices: Advanced Research and Technology, Space Science, Applications, and Manned Space Flight.
Among Webb’s priorities in the aftermath of Vostok 2 was a refinement of the space hardware NASA had contracted, to better match its evolving mission. Among the early casualties were von Braun’s Mercury-Redstone rockets. According to astronaut Deke Slayton, Vostok 2 “permanently kill[ed] Mercury-Redstone 5” in favor of larger Atlas (air force) rockets.
The Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle had been designed specifically for suborbital flights such as those accomplished by Shepard and Grissom. It was America’s first manned space booster. Administrators had originally planned for at least two more such missions before putting an astronaut into full orbit, but on August 18, NASA announced that the data collected from Shepard’s and Grissom’s suborbital missions had been carefully analyzed and more than sufficed. No further Redstone tests would be needed. The federal space agency was speeding up Mercury’s plan to send an astronaut, reportedly, to orbit Earth on a U.S. Air Force rocket.
Generally speaking, “speeding up” a technical process isn’t advisable, especially when human lives are at stake. Acceleration could mean a spaceship torn apart in flight or a disastrous communication failure. But Vostok 2 had forced Kennedy’s hand, and NASA’s. Although quickening production added human and technical risks, fears of a Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag planted on the moon loomed large, leaving the Kennedy administration few other choices. In Huntsville, the challenge sparked a new wave of determination to quickly develop Saturn rockets. Much federal funding was at stake. “The next flight by an astronaut would be on the Atlas,” Deke Slayton wrote later. “We hoped by the end of the year.”
The U.S. Air Force’s Atlas rocket, which provided five times the thrust of the army’s Redstone, was considered a “man-ready” vehicle, able to take a person into space, but it had been prone to disintegration during unmanned testing. With construction not yet begun on von Braun’s new three-stage Saturn design, and deployment still years away, acceleration of the Mercury program rested on whether a reliably safe Atlas was ready. In September, an unmanned Mercury capsule was fired off on top of an Atlas as a dress rehearsal for a manned voyage. After taking off without a hitch, the capsule parachuted to a perfect landing in the Atlantic near Bermuda and was retrieved by the U.S. destroyer Decatur.
WITH HOUSTON CHOSEN as NASA’s manned-space hub, Webb now needed to choose the right technical manager for Apollo. The two most obvious candidates, von Braun and Silverstein, director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Programs, distrusted each other. (Silverstein, of Jewish heritage, couldn’t stomach even being physically near von Braun, with his Nazi past.) For a number of reasons, Webb didn’t consider either of the brilliant engineers quite right for the management job. He tried recruiting Captain Levering Smith, deputy head of the U.S. Navy’s Polaris program, but Smith chose to stay with the nuclear navy at the new rank of vice admiral. Eventually, Webb chose an executive in the private sector, D. Brainerd Holmes of RCA, for the job. At the time, Holmes had been busy overseeing the design and implementation of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, setting up enormous high-tech installations in Arctic Alaska, Greenland, and Scotland. Taking a large salary cut, Brainerd left RCA and joined NASA on November 1, as director of the Office of Manned Space Flight. Just five weeks later, Holmes established a third NASA project, Gemini, as a training program. Featuring two-man crews, Project Gemini would bridge the gap between the one-man Project Mercury missions and the three-man Apollo launches.
In late November, NASA blasted an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral. It reached full Earth orbit for the first time, giving its crewman, a chimpanzee named Enos, the distinction of becoming only the third hominid to reach so deeply into space, after Gagarin and Titov. At a famous press conference, Kennedy deadpanned: “The chimpanzee who is flying in space took off at 10:08. He reports that everything is perfect and working well.” Although scheduled for three orbits, the mission was ended after two revolutions due to technical malfunctions, and Enos returned safely to Earth—a triumph, but the wrong kind of triumph. In the wake of Titov’s mind-boggling flight and East Germany’s construction of the Berlin Wall, Kennedy worried that the national fascination with the moonshot was eroding as NASA continued its methodical program of unmanned missions. A chimpanzee, cute as he might be, was no substitute for another Shepard or Grissom.
Sensing that JFK’s moonshot was, for the time being, more aspirational than newsworthy, the White House press corps largely avoided the subject, but sometimes the wrong kind of news would creep in. As a case in point, Dr. Al Hibbs, chief of space sciences at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, a NASA affiliate, told the press on November 21 that the United States had “less than a 50-50 chance” of beating the Soviets to the moon. Coming from one of the country’s leading aerospace technology institutions, Hibbs’s gloomy assessment was quoted in newspapers all over America.
Hibbs wasn’t alone. Other space experts were also skeptical, including Dr. Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s former boss at Peenemünde, who was then chief scientist for partner Bell Aerospace. On November 30, he told a space symposium in Louisiana that the Soviets were far ahead in developing ICBMs and artificial satellites. Blaming this deficit on U.S. indifference from 1945 until the Sputnik launch in 1957 toward manufacturing ballistic missiles, Dornberger cast doubt on America’s ability to catch up. “The Russians will be able to intercept and shoot down our satellites within a few years,” Dornberger predicted. “We will not be able to shoot down their satellites.” Whether or not his analysis was entirely accurate, he frighteningly spoke as though war in space were inevitable, another roiling theme in light of Vostok 2’s show of continued Soviet innovation.
IF LATE 1961 was a challenge for NASA and America’s space morale, the bright spot was the marine who was waiting to take the national stage. Forty-year-old Ohioan John Glenn was the oldest of the Mercury Seven astronauts, yet he often looked the youngest. With his boyish face, bright smile, penetrating blue eyes, and general air of collegial optimism, he was impossible not to like. Slated to take the third suborbital Mercury mission, he was bumped up to a full orbital flight when the program jumped ahead in August, and he spent the last months of the year training with his backup, Scott Carpenter of Colorado.
While Glenn waited for his big moment, Kennedy was focused on other aspects of space exploration: opening orbital space to communications satellites and closing it to nuclear arms. Just four years after Sputnik, U.S. companies were vying to exploit the potential commercial viability of satellites. Two American physicists at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory had also made dramatic strides in monitoring satellite radio transmissions, thereby establishing the conceptual foundation for global positioning systems (the beginning of today’s GPS). Underdeveloped regions of Latin America, Asia, and Africa could be brought into modernity, it was thought, via cutting-edge satellite technology. “Never before has a major scientific venture involved such mutual dependence” between industry and government, wrote George J. Feldman of Massachusetts, chief counsel for the Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration. JFK was emerging as the poster president of the same military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower had warned about in his farewell address. A new era of space-related inventions and entrepreneurial innovations was poised to begin. But this communications revolution required America to secure new “open skies” treaties with other countries, notably the USSR, a nation that equated satellite communications with spying.
On December 5 at the United Nations, the U.S. delegation submitted a resolution on the peaceful uses of space. Heavily promoted by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, it called for a registry of satellites, cooperation on weather satellites, and extension of communication via satellites to all nations as soon as possible. The Soviet Union responded negatively. Kennedy expected nothing less, but he still needed such an agreement.
Two days later, Glenn’s mission, named by him Friendship 7 (in homage to his fellow Mercury cohorts), was suddenly delayed. This caught nearly everyone at NASA by surprise, especially Glenn. The reasons for pauses and postponements ranged widely. One was the undeniable fact that NASA’s “hurry-up plans,” in the words of Associated Press reporting, were too rushed amid too much Cold War tension. Another was the fear that a Friendship 7 disaster just before Christmas would cripple NASA permanently, drying up its congressional funding. Public doubts about the moonshot would grow. The equally tense negotiations over the UN satellite resolution were another consideration. From Kennedy’s point of view, the double-whammy PR disaster that would ensue were Glenn to be incinerated on liftoff and his satellite treaty to fail at the United Nations made the December launch too risky. Timing was everything in politics and diplomacy, and JFK simply wasn’t ready to gamble his long-term peaceful plans for space on a made-for-TV “keeping up with the Soviets” launch. And then there was the official NASA reason for delays: mechanical problems. Deeming the president’s caution reasonable, Glenn accepted the postponement without public complaint, even though inside he was desperate for the launch to happen.
Khrushchev played on Kennedy’s equivocations to his geopolitical advantage. The Soviet premier gave another of his bombastic televised speeches, which seemed to be directed mainly at the American president, pounding his fist repeatedly as he bragged about the superiority of his country’s nuclear arsenal. The Soviets were known to have renewed atmospheric nuclear testing, which had prompted the United States to conduct its own atmospheric exercises on a similar scale. Khrushchev’s speech seemed to portend an end to all JFK’s hopes for serious disarmament, or at least for an effective test-ban treaty.
One aspect of Khrushchev’s provocative speech stabbed at another of Kennedy’s priorities. Underscoring Dr. Dornberger’s impression that the Soviets’ main goal was to dominate the battlefield of space, Khrushchev boasted more than once about his nation’s ability to arm rockets of the kind that had already put Soviet cosmonauts into orbit. If that capability became a reality, then the demilitarized idea of a moon voyage would be absurdly naïve.
The speech was meant to intimidate the United States but it came across as primarily hyperbolic blather. Nevertheless, within two days, the USSR made the truly surprising announcement that it would support the “peaceful uses of space” resolution. The agreement gave Kennedy a major win, blemished temporarily over the Christmas holiday when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced that he was authorizing research into equipping U.S. rockets with nuclear weapons. After the press pounced, McNamara backed away from the controversial claim.
ON DECEMBER 7, 1961, the twentieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Dr. Robert Gilruth of NASA revealed to Kennedy the plan to develop a two-person spacecraft as the necessary bridge between Mercury and the moonshot. Alex Nagg from NASA headquarters in Washington dubbed the effort Project Gemini, after the constellation that included the twin stars Castor and Pollux, a sign of the zodiac controlled by Mercury.
On December 22, McDonnell Aircraft of St. Louis was given the government contract to develop Gemini capsules, following up on their success building more than twenty Mercury capsules since 1959. One stipulation was that the first Gemini capsule had to be manufactured within fifteen months. After that, a new capsule would be delivered to NASA every sixty days. “Gemini’s a Corvette,” Gus Grissom recalled of the upgrade. “Mercury was a Volkswagen.” Meanwhile, the Titan II, to be assembled by Martin Marietta of Baltimore, was selected as Gemini’s launch vehicle; it was a modified ICBM developed by the U.S. Air Force. The company also had test stand facilities in Littleton, Colorado. On January 15, 1962, Gilruth explained NASA’s three new “Project” organizations to the public: one organization for Mercury, one for Gemini, and one for Apollo—all civilian, of course, though that public image belied the agency’s deep collaboration with the military. And new Earth landing systems for both normal atmospheric entry and various abort contingencies were being developed at considerable cost to avoid the mishaps of Liberty Bell 7.
LIKE MOST OTHER Americans, John Kennedy started 1962 concerned about the space race. In his State of the Union address, he acknowledged that the United States might not win: “This nation belongs among the first to explore [the moon]. And among the first, if not the first, we shall be.” It wasn’t the strongest of promises. But Kennedy ably gave himself cover just in case the Soviets pulled off a moonshot. “Our aim,” the president continued, “is not simply to be first on the Moon, any more than Charles Lindbergh’s real aim was to be first to Paris. His aim was to develop the techniques and the authority of this country and other countries in the field of the air and the atmosphere.” That point is arguable; the Orteig Prize of twenty-five thousand dollars had loomed large for Lindbergh, and its sponsor specifically stipulated that it would go to the aviator who was first, not “among” the first, to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. Nonetheless, Lindbergh was not the only “among the first” to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean, the British duo of John Alcock and Arthur Brown, most notably, having accomplished that feat in 1919. Having grown up in that era, JFK knew that Lindbergh’s fame was not diminished in the least by Alcock and Brown.
Like a doctor speaking to a patient’s family before a serious operation, Kennedy was trying to lower his audience’s high expectations. A genius at reading public sentiment, he understood that American citizens were aware that the United States might lose the race to the moon, and he wanted to assure them that was all right. If that were to occur, Kennedy would try to minimize the Soviet achievement, as Eisenhower had done after Sputnik. Regardless of the Soviets, NASA was still going to the moon, because first or not, going to the moon was a noble venture. Kennedy then charged onward in the speech to the more upbeat topic of the strides that had been made toward “peace in space” and the myriad of wonders that satellite technology would enable.
Kennedy was far more specific about space exploration in his first one-on-one conversation with John Glenn while the astronaut was waiting for his Friendship 7 mission to be cleared following problems with the Atlas rocket fuel tanks, which led to postponements on January 16 and then again on January 20. Glenn was, in fact, surprised to receive a summons to the White House in early 1962. He and Kennedy had a casual chat, “one human being to another—as one ‘guy’ to another, if you will,” the astronaut recalled a couple of years later of his February 5 meeting. “He just wanted to talk about what was planned on the flight and I went into some of the details of what we expected to experience. . . . He brought up whether we felt very personally every possible thing had been done to ensure our safety and I told him that when we first came into the program one of the things we were told, by [Space Task Group chief Robert] Gilruth, was that we had veto control over anything that was to occur on the project. That at any time we, as experienced test pilots, saw something going on that we didn’t like or there was an area that we thought needed more testing or anything that we weren’t satisfied with, to let him know. . . . The President thought that was an excellent way to conduct such a project.”
Impressed that Glenn had won the Distinguished Flying Cross five times and flown fifty-nine missions in the South Pacific, sometimes with baseball great Ted Williams as wingman, Kennedy asked so many questions (about g-forces, rocket control, and NASA planning) that the astronaut offered to come back with models of the Mercury-Atlas 6 and Mercury capsule Number 9 he’d soon be riding. The president agreed, and Glenn returned to the White House days later for an even longer discussion. The constancy of Glenn’s code of honor was something Kennedy was deeply impressed with. It reminded him of his deceased brother, Joseph Kennedy Jr. “John tries to behave,” a friend of Glenn told a Life reporter, “as if every impressionable youngster in the country were watching him every moment of the day.”
Realizing that Glenn was a man of honest faith, persistence, and the instinct for courage, Kennedy initiated a warm friendship with his next Mercury astronaut, one that transcended the obvious fact that both were banking heavily on the success of Friendship 7. Meanwhile, Glenn, who had flown hundreds of daunting navy missions in training props, warplanes, and experimental jets over the previous twenty years, realized that he needed to address the possibility that he might die during his Mercury spaceflight. For the first time, he spoke to each of the members of his family about this dreaded possilibity, hoping to ensure that none of them had, or would have, any regrets.
FRIENDSHIP 7 WAS an airtight, watertight, and soundproof marvel of compact engineering, containing more than ten thousand components, seven miles of wiring, and shielding able to protect its pilot from both Arctic cold and three-thousand-degree heat. Built by McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, the capsule boasted a recessed fiberglass couch (specially contoured to fit Glenn’s body); a gleaming instrument panel with more than one hundred dials, switches, and lights; a wide-angle window and periscope; and a parachute, recovery gear, and emergency exit system.
On February 20, 1962, Glenn awoke at 1:30 a.m. for his fourteenth scheduled attempt at launch. For once the sky was serene and unclouded, the Atlantic calm, and nobody could think of a reason not to make a go. The final countdown for Friendship 7 began a little after nine that morning, with the launchpad bathed in sunshine. Word spread that in a little more than eighty minutes the marine astronaut would lift off on the 125-ton Atlas-Mercury 6, en route to circling the planet. It would be only a minor exaggeration to say that the least nervous person in the country was Glenn himself, lying on his back stoically, his pent-up frustration over the long delays had transformed into well-focused hope and faith as the clock ticked down. “Don’t be scared,” Glenn telephoned his wife, Annie, who was at their home in Arlington, Virginia, their two children at her side. “Remember I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
At 9:47 a.m. Eastern time, the Atlas rocket fired 367,000 pounds of thrust and rose with an initial slowness that some observers thought majestic and others thought worrisomely hesitant. That Atlas vehicle had a relatively low thrust-to-weight ratio. As the propellant burned, the vehicle became lighter and accelerated faster. Scott Carpenter, serving as astronaut capsule communicator for the mission, wished for his friend “Godspeed, John Glenn.” Even though Glenn’s earphones didn’t pick up Carpenter’s parting message, the salutation was caught on tape, went viral within NASA culture, and Walter Cronkite of CBS News turned it into the catchphrase of the entire Mercury flight. Tom O’Malley, General Dynamics’ test director, prayerfully added, “[M]ay the good Lord ride with you all the way.”
In living rooms from coast to coast, America vibrated with anticipation as it watched Glenn’s Atlas rocket soar skyward, with coverage on every TV network. At that moment, commuters in New York City left their trains empty while they stayed glued to televisions in Grand Central Terminal. Millions of schoolchildren around the country watched as well, on sets borrowed and brought in just for that day. In Dover, Ohio, businesses locked their doors so that employees could watch the historic launch on TV or listen to the play-by-play on the radio. In Trenton, New Jersey, a bank robber got away with almost nine thousand dollars that Wednesday morning and then stopped for a quick drink at a bar, where he ended up staying to watch Glenn’s flight on television. The police caught up with him there. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a judge and jury were hearing testimony in a case involving a stolen television when the judge suggested they turn the TV on to watch the launch—which they did. Up the road in Detroit, operators at Michigan Bell Telephone reported to their bosses that there might have been an equipment failure, because their usual heavy load of calls had completely dried up in the moments before liftoff.
Eyes and ears all across America were fixed on Glenn. In Salt Lake City, folks brought transistor radios into restaurants and listened to the nail-biting coverage. At a coffee shop fortunate enough to have a television, an employee reported packed crowds who “watched as though they were spellbound.” In spring training for their inaugural season, the New York Mets were practicing leading off first base when Casey Stengel, never the most easygoing manager in baseball, stopped the drills so his ballplayers could watch the launch. On site at Cape Canaveral, tears flowed as Friendship 7 moved past its initial hesitancy and headed toward the heavens. Even the most cynical reporter called out, “Go, baby, go!”
More than forty million American homes had tuned in to the Glenn mission. Traveling seventeen thousand miles an hour, three times faster than Shepard had, Glenn described the African coast, gorgeous rainbow radiance, and blazing blue bands glowing around Earth. “Wonderful as man-made art may be,” Glenn would write of his space odyssey, “it cannot compare in my mind to the sunsets and sunrises, God’s masterpieces.” On CBS, the invariably enthusiastic Cronkite anchored for ten straight hours, with the banner “Man in Orbit” splashed across the screen beneath him. With no live cameras aboard the spacecraft (as there would be for journeys later in the decade), Cronkite and the other space anchors painted a picture with words for their TV audience, marveling at Glenn’s stoic composure, cooped up in a claustrophobic capsule with just over twenty-four hours of breathable air. Ensconced much more comfortably at the CBS News Cape Canaveral facility, Cronkite became the maestro of the historical moment, whose dissemination through TV and radio, according to the New York Times, “united the nation and the world . . . in a common sharing of the excitement, tension and drama” around the flight.
However, all was not going well with Glenn’s mission. Mercury Control in Florida was jarred by a telemetry signal “segment 51” from Friendship 7, indicating that the heavy-duty heat shield was probably loose. Glenn was told about the malfunction by astronaut Gordon Cooper over the radio. Without one erg of emotion, Glenn acknowledged the technical problem but stayed calm and carried on. Back at Cape Canaveral, the collective nervousness was palpable, and technicians began to discuss emergency plans. The capsule’s designer, Max Faget, was consulted on the vessel’s aerodynamics. Lieutenant Colonel John “Shorty” Powers, the Project Mercury information officer, told the TV networks that if the heat shield became unhinged, Glenn’s life would be in danger. Even if the shield were only slightly loose, that could complicate the planned ocean splashdown. Fear mounted at NASA and around the world that Friendship 7 might incinerate, that the aerodynamic effects of reentry could tear the capsule wide open. “I knew that if the shield was falling apart,” Glenn later wrote, “I would feel the heat pulse first at my back, and I waited for it.”
Before long, Glenn lost radio contact with Mercury Control due to a technical malfunction. Nobody knew the status of Friendship 7. It was the first blackout in a manned spaceflight, a ghastly four-and-a-half-minute silence amplifying the incredible distance between Glenn and the world. The tension was so great that, for millions of viewers, time froze. When radio contact was restored and Glenn again spoke to Mercury Control, a collective sigh of relief could be heard at NASA. Their astronaut still had a fighting chance of survival. The descent back to Earth proved a wild and bumpy ride, but the primary parachute opened as planned when Friendship 7 reached 10,800 feet. At 2:42 p.m. Eastern time, the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic, about forty miles off course. For a long spell, Glenn sat in the bobbing capsule, sweating profusely—he’d been trained not to open the hatch prematurely. “How do you feel?” Shepard asked from Mission Control. “Oh, pretty good,” Glenn said. “What is your general condition? Are you pretty well?” Shepard continued to inquire. “My condition is good,” said Glenn. “But that was a real fireball, boy. I had great chunks of retro-pack breaking off all the way through.”
Drenched in sweat, Glenn shed his harness, clutched his survival kit, and prepared to make an emergency exit if necessary. He didn’t have to. In short order, the destroyer USS Noa arrived. Glenn opened the hatch door, made a fast exit, and once aboard the navy ship, was taken immediately to medics on the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. The whole operation was a giant win for NASA. Although dehydrated and five pounds lighter than when he stepped into the spacecraft, Glenn was in good shape. Kennedy called him with words of praise and pride. No longer was America “second best” in space.
Once the astronaut was retrieved, the world delighted with an outpouring of love and excitement that easily surpassed what had greeted the previous Mercury astronauts on their return. Jubilant space mania was in the air. An Ohioan with the scruples of a Boy Scout had orbited Earth three times in just under five hours—once every 88.29 minutes, a total of 81,000 miles, at a speed of 17,545 miles per hour and an altitude of 160 miles. Glenn, the “Clean Marine,” became the most famous heroic explorer of the American century since Charles Lindbergh. “The best moment,” Cronkite wrote in a syndicated column, “was when Shorty Powers announced from Mercury Control: ‘We have a hale and hearty astronaut.’”
Fierce patriotism rose like a sudden swamp fog around America. Morale zoomed from worst to first and got people talking about the moonshot again. Astronauts Shepard and Slayton summed up the post–Friendship 7 euphoria best: “The distance to the moon was starting to lessen.” Because everything seemed to have changed on one memorable American morning, a California journalist suggested that February 20 be a national holiday ever afterward. “Orbit Day? Space Day? Glenn Day?” Bob Wells of the Long Beach Independent asked readers to weigh in, and a dozen decent ideas came forth.
Kennedy flew to Cape Canaveral three days after the Friendship 7 flight, to receive a briefing from Glenn and pose for a series of photo ops, where he treated the astronaut as if he were a brother. Bursting with pride, Glenn brought his wife, Annie, and their two children to meet his friend the president. Over the days that followed, at Cape Canaveral and then back in Washington, astronaut and president spent many hours together, delivering public relations victories both for JFK’s New Frontier and for NASA. Glenn was not a wit on par with Kennedy, but he could more than hold his own on history and politics. Jackie Kennedy noted that both men projected an aura of “cool” self-control. The president was riveted as Glenn told him about seeing three sunsets and three dawns in just his four-hour, fifty-six-minute flight.
As the two families spent more time together over that summer of 1962, the First Lady became, as her friend Cyrus Sulzberger recalled, “vastly impressed by John Glenn, the astronaut. She says he is the most controlled person on earth. Even Jack, she said, who is highly self-controlled and has the ability to relax easily and to sleep as and when he wishes, to shrug off the problems of the world, seems fidgety and loose compared to Glenn. Glenn is the most dominating man she ever met.”
Joining the chorus singing Glenn’s praises was von Braun. He was thrilled that now the United States had put up three astronauts (Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn) compared to only two Soviets (Gagarin and Titov). At a press conference from Florida, the rocketeer said that with Glenn’s Mercury flight, America had taken a “Bunyan step” forward toward the moon. Soon, a genuine friendship was forged between the rocket scientist and the charismatic astronaut. When Glenn went on a goodwill mission to West Germany and Switzerland a few years later, he wrote a postcard in German to von Braun that read, “Here I am in Lucerne and you are in Huntsville. What a switch!”
A week after Glenn’s flight, Kennedy again met with the space hero at the West Palm Beach airport to fly back to Washington together on Air Force One. In the coming months, Kennedy commissioned the French-born industrial designer Raymond Loewy—whose logos for Lucky Strike cigarette packages and Ritz cracker boxes were popular—to revamp Air Force One. Following JFK’s orders, the words United States of America were emblazoned on the blue-white fuselage. Jackie had wanted her five-year-old daughter, Caroline, to meet Glenn, so they came to the Air Force One tarmac for a quick meet-and-greet. “We were on the plane, and the president boarded, and behind him came Jackie with little Caroline, holding her by the hand. Jackie said, ‘Caroline, this is the astronaut who went around the Earth in the spaceship,’” Glenn recalled. “‘This is Colonel Glenn.’” Caroline stared at Glenn with a look of confusion in her eyes. She started looking all around Air Force One, a deep sadness engulfed her face. Fighting back tears, her voice trembling, she asked, “But where’s the monkey?”
JFK found himself saying nice things about Ham and Enos to please Caroline. Once Air Force One lifted off, Kennedy proofread the speech Glenn planned to deliver to a joint session of Congress. It was solid. “I still get a hard to define feeling inside when the flag goes by,” Glenn later told the assembled lawmakers. “I know you do too.” Perhaps someday, Glenn hoped, Old Glory would be planted on the moon. Later that day, at a White House Rose Garden ceremony, Kennedy connected his own lifelong affinity for sailing in the Atlantic to NASA’s exploration of the cosmos. “We have a long way to go in this space race,” the president said with Glenn by his side. “We started late, but this is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.”
Glenn returned the respect of the Kennedys, becoming a valued member of their inner circle. He and Bobby Kennedy, whose knowledge of space was quite limited, grew especially close. But Jack was the one who encouraged Glenn to consider a career switch to electoral politics. Asked about his political affiliation, Glenn replied that he was registered as an independent, sparking a concerted and ultimately successful effort by the Kennedy brothers to woo Glenn to the Democrats. Glenn had become such a valued New Frontier icon, given a ticker-tape parade in New York City reminiscent of Lindbergh’s in 1927, that NASA official Charles Bolden reported that JFK didn’t dare “risk putting him back in space again.”
From the start, Glenn recognized that the president had a rare intelligence and a lively interest in even some minute details of the space program. Glenn was happy to oblige, giving Kennedy a friendly education in the hard science of space and providing a firsthand understanding of what going there had been like. Two years later, Glenn recalled JFK’s ability to remember details from a conversation they’d had in the weeks preceding the flight: “When I came back, he recalled quite a number of these things I had said in [our] preflight meeting on the 5th of February. Most of the things that we had expected in space flight were encountered and he recalled these all very accurately. He evidently had remembered all the things we talked about that day.”
Vice President Lyndon Johnson watches as Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn shakes hands with John F. Kennedy, on February 23, 1962, the day the president presented the astronaut with NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Glenn received the award after orbiting the planet three times in his little capsule, Friendship 7.
Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
As Glenn came to know Kennedy better, in weekends on Cape Cod or at White House dinners, he tried to answer a fundamental question: Just what was the president’s personal interest in space exploration? JFK was the driving spirit putting America into the business of space, yet his motivations remained something of a mystery to Glenn. Was it just smart politics? Or did Kennedy truly enjoy the prospect of a manned voyage to the moon? Some observers contended that the president was interested only in the Cold War and that if there had been no Soviet Union, there would have been no moonshot. Had a more benign nation such as Denmark, Australia, or Brazil marshaled its resources to lead the way into space, would JFK have backed a $25 billion American effort to surpass it?
Ultimately, John Glenn believed that Jack Kennedy indeed would have. “His attitude toward the whole project changed a little bit as time went on,” Glenn recalled in a 1964 oral history interview. “I think early in the program, from statements I have read and from personal remarks when we were together, that he saw it originally as more of a competitive thing with the Russians. That we couldn’t let them best us in this scientific field. Period. This, of course, is one phase of the program. However, those of us in the program have felt that the program is completely worthwhile even if there was no such place as Russia, just on the basis of being an exploration and research capability. I think his statements and his feelings on this came more around to the latter as time went on.” Glenn believed that Kennedy at heart was an avatar of “public discovery,” pushing for science and exploration both to advance human knowledge and for the economic value they’d bring. “His vision set an inspiring example, and I saw that the Kennedy charisma could move millions to contribute to something I thought was vital,” Glenn wrote of JFK, “a democracy of energized participation in which people shared their talents with the nation and kept it improving and evolving.”
The success of Glenn’s mission created a popular culture boom around all things space. His ticker-tape parade in New York City was like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, with Glenn standing in for all the helium balloons. Fashion designers in Soho such as André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne, and Pierre Cardin went astro-chic in advertisements in Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. Architect John Lautner built his iconic Chemosphere in the Hollywood Hills, which hovered like a flying saucer above the valley, while Eero Saarinen built his elegant Gateway Arch in St. Louis (constructed between 1963 and 1965) with a futuristic feel. Seeing UFOs in your own backyard became the strange rage. Edward Craven Walker designed the Astro lamp (aka lava lamp) to give owners an outer space experience in their own bedrooms. The injection-molded and stackable Polyside chair was modeled after satellites, while kitchen appliances were marketed as Space Age gadgetry. Prototypes of rocket automobiles were designed, while TV shows such as Lost in Space and The Jetsons became wildly popular. In the world of music, the hit song became “Moon River,” composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer; it won the 1962 Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Handsome TV host Andy Williams made “Moon River” the theme of his popular show. When Bobby Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, went to California for a brief holiday they picked John Glenn up at the airport with Andy Williams in tow. “It was so wonderful,” Ethel Kennedy recalled. “We were all in a car together, driving around, singing ‘Moon River.’ It was a grand kick.”
TO OBSERVERS AT home, Friendship 7 seemed to have catapulted America into the lead in space, though in truth Glenn’s three orbits paled beside Gherman Titov’s seventeen laps and the overall greater complexity of the Vostok 2 mission. Nevertheless, NASA’s manned space program was clearly gaining momentum. Friendship 7 was the triumph of Kennedy’s “soft power” approach to convincing the world that American technology was more advanced than Soviet. When Kennedy presented Glenn the NASA Distinguished Service Medal on February 23 for his successful mission, the astronaut graciously averred that he was just a “figurehead” for the New Frontier’s “big, tremendous effort.”
Notes of congratulations poured into the White House that late February, from schoolchildren, teachers, fellow politicians, and average citizens, and Kennedy happily answered a random selection. A number of people wanted to use Glenn for Cold War propaganda advantage over the Soviets. “May I humbly offer a suggestion to your Excellency?” Carl H. Peterson wrote Kennedy. “Would it not be a splendid idea to appoint our famous Astronaut Col. John Glenn to be an Ambassador of Good Will to all Nations of the World that will want to know what is in outer space which Col. Glenn can explain so well? This could inadvertently make the road for Khrushchev rockier.”
In fact, Glenn’s flight seemed to have shocked Khrushchev into an uncharacteristic silence. Eventually, he sent the obligatory congratulatory note to the White House, expressing stilted praise for Glenn’s courage before echoing Kennedy’s own suggestion about space cooperation at their meeting the previous June. “If our countries pooled their efforts—scientific, technical and material—to master the universe,” he wrote, “this would be . . . acclaimed by all peoples who would like to see scientific achievements benefit man and not be used for ‘cold war’ purposes and the arms race.”
Not wanting to suggest that Kennedy was using the Glenn launch “for ‘cold war’ purposes and the arms race”—though he clearly was, as was Khrushchev—the White House lost no time in responding publicly. Within hours of receiving the premier’s dispatch, the president was standing at a press conference, duly celebrating Glenn’s mission but giving even more time in his introductory remarks to the Soviet leader’s suggestion and, even more so, his own history of calling for U.S.-Soviet cooperation in space. “I am replying to his message today,” JFK told the assembled reporters and his television audience, “and I regard it as most encouraging.” With the arrival of Khrushchev’s message of goodwill, the science of space disappeared and the two leaders’ tit-for-tat game returned—the one in which the need to be seen winning the propaganda war was almost as important as actually winning the Cold War.
THAT SPRING, THE Kennedy administration sponsored Friendship 7 on a second mission. The craft was loaded onto a giant C-124 cargo plane and sent on a thirty-city “Around the World with Friendship 7” tour to promote U.S. space achievements; one wag called it “the Fourth Orbit.” At the Science Museum in London, throngs of spectators showed up on opening day, so many that thousands of would-be visitors had to be turned away. Around the world, newspaper photos showed Freedom 7 next to a trumpeting elephant in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), a mariachi band in Mexico, and a children’s choir in Nigeria. People often waited for three or four hours just to see the pride of McDonnell Aircraft and NASA. In Tokyo, half a million people queued up to photograph themselves next to the capsule when it was on display at a downtown department store. In India, over 1.5 million people lined the streets of Bombay (now Mumbai), hoping for a glimpse of the space capsule. Every balcony, window, and roof was jammed with enthralled spectators.
Like Glenn himself, Friendship 7 was a golden advertisement for Kennedy’s New Frontier agenda, and a fine public relations counterstatement to the Soviets’ trumpeting of Gagarin one year before, not to mention the commemorative stamps, coins, postcards, and other mementos that had celebrated Soviet space superiority ever since Sputnik. As Glenn wrote McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security advisor, the “fourth orbit” wasn’t merely a propaganda extravaganza but “a well-thought-out scientific [education] program that could eventually benefit all peoples of the world as the scientific exploration it is.”
The incredibly popular Glenn visited the Seattle World’s Fair on May 10, which showcased the landmark Space Needle. Mobs of people followed the astronaut around, craning their necks for a glimpse of his reddish crew-cut head, hoping for an autograph or photo. Accompanied by von Braun, Glenn traveled on the futuristic Monorail and rode the elevator to the top of the Space Needle, which had been built especially for the exposition. The highlight was when Glenn attended a NASA conference at the Seattle Opera House that day. Gherman Titov had already appeared at the World’s Fair and claimed he “saw neither angels or gods” in space. Asked for a comment on that assessment, Glenn shrugged it off, claiming his orbit had reaffirmed his bedrock Christian values and democratic beliefs.
Surrounding Glenn at the opera house were members of the “100,000 Foot Club,” a group of test pilots who had attained that altitude in balloons, rockets, and other aircraft. But Glenn, who gave a better-than-decent presentation, was the man everyone wanted a piece of. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer joked that the NASA press conference might as well have been Glenn and “eight guys named Joe.” What nobody realized was that the quiet Purdue University graduate and Korean War ace sitting next to the panel chairman was the man who would eclipse even Glenn’s fame and achieve Kennedy’s moonshot challenge by the end of the decade: Neil Armstrong.