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One wonders why he does, after all these years in the U.S. Senate and a presidential run and a life of modest, quiet success. For more ordinary men, motives would hardly be mysterious. In 1985 I was a semifinalist in the Journalist-in-Space program. (Here, feel free to remark that it would please you to see all journalists shot into space.) After Challenger, the semis were as far as the competition went. Interviewed at Penn State, I had no trouble explaining why I wanted to be chosen: to go where no journalist had gone, to write about a wholly new experience. Age hardly mattered to me; I was 44. But it did not matter either to my fellow semifinalist Walter Cronkite, who, I am sure, was impelled by the same desire to tell a good story.
For the old hero Glenn, however, going back into space must have a more complicated meaning, one he has perhaps not worked out fully himself. One reason certainly has to do with getting out of Washington, a good idea under any circumstances. Then there is the prospect of going on a mission that stands the chance of accomplishing something; Congress's orbits are less picturesque. It must be nice to contemplate work with comrades where lives depend on lives. All that must drive him, and the danger of course. When one grows older, it's useful to have a little danger back, to run counter to all the impulses for safety that come with being weaker and breakable.
But for Glenn, who knows? He is not an ordinary man, and while it is easy to ascribe to him such low-energy motives as regained glory, he may have a private purpose in taking this flight. He is a genuine hero, after all; that is who he is. He may wish to return to the only country where he feels like himself.
"I could see a few stars even by day against the black sky," he wrote after his original voyage. "I observed them best at night, and I was roughly able to determine my position with reference to familiar groups such as Orion or the Pleiades. Each time around, I noticed a strange phenomenon. The stars shone steady as they neared the horizon. Then they dimmed for a bit. But the stars brightened again before actually setting. They appeared to be passing through a layer of haze about six to eight degrees above the earth and two degrees thick." A man who has lived among the stars may feel he belongs there.
As for us earthbound, it should feel good to rise vicariously off the planet with him again and to take a ride where youth and age meet, and the sky is endless, and the world looks clean, bright and valuable.