This is no country for old men, so John Glenn will be leaving it in October--will quit the entire planet and head out for a realm where age doesn't count. Oddly, it was the realization that young people go through the process of aging in space--cardiovascular shifts, immune-system changes, loss of muscle and of bone density--that gave Glenn his long-sought means of getting back to the extra-world that made him. What was a usable scientific rationale for him became a new way to understand space for others. If the young temporarily grow old out there, then space is for the ageless, and the old hero becomes a distinct possibility.
The old hero! What an idea! Not an older person who was formerly great, like a De Gaulle or a DiMaggio or a Golda Meir, but an active hero in old age. Fiction gives us such characters from time to time, but reality is too real. The flesh-and-blood old hero may need a special logic to return to the field of conquest. Try this on for size: So much of space exists in the past (dead stars shine). Why shouldn't someone be able to retrieve the past in the future and be young again by being old?
Whatever Glenn or any of his boosters say is the purpose of this mission, you and I know it is about romance and adventure and danger and the beauty of a person on a quest. The story-hungry mind is ageless too. And here is the old/new story of courage in a distant place, of daring and going. Never mind that the carpers call this mission useless. The public does not require a usefulness beyond its own admiring pleasure. As for the practicalities of the space program, it was never so useful as when it reminded the country of heroic capabilities.
In a time of little people consumed with little matters, here is a giant who is also a man. After the Challenger disaster, the fissures in the space program began to show, and when the people at NASA started to put the program back together, they shifted its appeal from the heroism of individuals to scientific cleverness--without success. Only last year's Pathfinder probe to Mars revived some of the keen attention people gave the space effort in the early 1960s. However entertaining it was to watch the cute little robot strut its stuff, it would always be the person in space who enthralled the public heart. All the old images that came back with Alan Shepard's death a few weeks ago--the splashdown, the A-O.K.s, the Michelin tire man's space suits--connected to our favorite machines: ourselves.
And the attraction isn't only that it's a person out there; it's the aloneness. The person is always alone; no matter if he really is alone or not. He is Columbus, Lindbergh and Glenn in his original three-orbit flight. After the Friendship 7 flight in 1962, Glenn said it for everyone: "Now we can get rid of some of that automatic equipment and let man take over."
It turned out then that he, taking over, had to fly the capsule by hand because the automatic-control system, which fired the small jets designed to stabilize the capsule's position, failed. The man had to take over too when dealing with the apparent threat that the heat shield had come loose, which meant that if it were to separate completely on re-entry, Glenn would be devoured in a flood of flames. The warning signal proved false, but Glenn and the people back at NASA could not know that, so men had to alter re-entry procedures.