GREENBELT -- John Glenn, U.S. senator and 77-year-old space pioneer, rocketed back into space on a pillar of fame and nostalgia yesterday as he and six other astronauts began a nine-day mission of scientific research on the space shuttle Discovery.
"Boy, enjoying the show," he gushed from orbit after a 36-year absence. "This is beautiful.
"I don't know what happens on down the line, but today is beautiful and great, and Hawaii is, I just can't even describe it," Glenn said.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists watched from jammed roadways near Florida's Cape Canaveral as the shuttle thundered into a clear blue sky at 2: 19 p.m. Millions more who hadn't watched a televised shuttle launch in years stopped their lives briefly to watch history remade.
They heard Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter -- a TV color commentator for this mission -- reprise his immortal benediction from 1962: "Good luck, have a safe flight and once again, Godspeed, John Glenn."
Barely eight minutes after liftoff, Discovery was in orbit 325 miles above the Earth, and John Glenn -- a Marine Corps veteran of World War II and Korea -- became the oldest human to fly in space.
By 7: 14 p.m., Glenn had eclipsed the 4 hours, 55 minutes he clocked as the first American to orbit Earth, a three-orbit mission in a Mercury capsule back in 1962.
As Discovery reached orbit, space rookie and mission specialist Pedro Duque, 35, became the first Spanish citizen to orbit Earth -- Spain's own "John Glenn." Also on board is payload specialist Dr. Chiaki Mukai, 46, a cardiovascular surgeon who in 1994 became the first Japanese woman to fly in space.
When the 15-year-old shuttle rose from the launch pad, National Aeronautics and Space Administration commentator Lisa Malone rolled out the first sound bite in a mission calculated to do real science while replenishing public interest in the manned space program.
"On this historic mission let the wings of Discovery lift us into the future," Malone said. "Liftoff of Discovery with a crew of six astronaut heroes and one American legend."
Other astronauts in the crew are Curtis L. Brown, 42, the commander; Steven W. Lindsey, 38, pilot; mission specialists Stephen K. Robinson, 43, and Scott E. Parazynski, 37.
The only flaw in the launch appeared to be the loss of the 22-by-18-inch door to a compartment in the shuttle's tail that holds the shuttle's parachute. The chute is deployed to slow the shuttle after landing, but it is not considered vital. "This is not a hazardous condition," mission control's Susan Still assured crew commander Brown.
Despite Glenn's age and his historic role in proving that America, like the Soviets, could orbit a man and bring him back safely, he is a lowly "PS2" on this flight -- the second-ranked payload specialist.
By the time they return to Earth on Nov. 7, the Discovery astronauts hope to have conducted or assisted with 83 experiments ranging from the biomedical effects of weightlessness, to solar physics, ultraviolet astronomy, cell growth and plant research.
They will deploy two satellites, and later retrieve one of them for return to Earth. The mission will also space-test hardware designed for use during the next servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Discovery's launch was delayed 19 minutes by five airplanes that blundered into closed airspace near the launch center. When liftoff came, cheers went up all around the Cape, at NASA centers across the country and at more humble places such as John Glenn High School, in the senator's hometown of New Concord, Ohio.
At the Payload Control Center at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, however, the reaction was a pin-drop silence.
As the shuttle cleared the launch tower and began its perilous climb toward orbit, dozens of engineers, technicians and scientists stopped their easy chatter and gathered quietly in front of TV monitors.
"This is all very personal," explained Tom Dixon, 36, mission manager for the mission's International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker experiments.
"Everyone here has not only worked with the hardware, we've also worked with all the people involved. Until the solid rocket motors separate, it's always very quiet," he said.
It was the failure of a solid rocket motor in 1986 that triggered the explosion on the shuttle Challenger, killing all seven astronauts.
It is a strikingly young crew at Goddard, fueled by lollipops, Girl Scout cookies and soda. Baltimore resident and operations director Brian Murphy -- the sole point of communications between Goddard's Payload Operations Center and Houston's mission control -- is 26.
The Glenn mission "doesn't feel that much different to me," he said. "This is about my sixth flight here."
At the Cape, Glenn's return to space was observed by more than 3,000 members of the media and hundreds of thousands of space enthusiasts. Among those watching were President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton and a large contingent of Washington VIPs, retired astronauts and celebrities, among them Steven Spielberg, Jimmy Buffett, Ted Williams and Garth Brooks.
State Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, ranking Democrat on the subcommittee that oversees NASA's budget, praised the mission.
"It is about glory and bravery," she said. "But the space program is also very important in terms of generating new knowledge and new technology. And it also leads to jobs here on planet Earth."
Of Glenn, she said, "Being an astronaut has been his great passion. But this is not only about being a space jockey. He really wanted to enjoy the challenge of training and going back into space, and showing that human potential is not limited by age."
The four-term Ohio Democrat lobbied NASA for years for permission to fly again. He argued that continuing research on the effects of prolonged weightlessness would be enhanced by adding data from a septuagenarian.
NASA's science consultants, including the National Institute on Aging, agreed real science could be gleaned from studying Glenn's aging body. In January, NASA granted his wish.
"I hope that all Americans share the exuberance that I feel today," the president said. "I feel like a kid at his first Christmas."
Earlier, Clinton described Glenn as a personal friend and a Democratic ally. But he denied that Glenn was allowed to fly in return for his political support in the Senate.
"The decision to send him was made strictly by the book. I had no role in it. He had to pass strenuous physical exams, and for each experiment he's going through, he had to prove that he was qualified and able to do that," Clinton said.
Others said Glenn's presence heaps added risks on the mission, and on its younger crew members. NASA officials called the added risk slight, and well worth the potential scientific gain.
Within three hours of yesterday's launch, Glenn had begun a long series of biomedical experiments to measure his body's reactions to prolonged weightlessness. Scientists want to monitor his blood and urine for signs of the muscle and bone depletion that typically accompany extended weightlessness. They will also check for signs of sleep and balance disturbances.
All these symptoms, temporary in astronauts, mimic the decline that can accompany old age and inactivity. If astronauts are to reach Mars, scientists must learn how to prevent or minimize these effects. If they are successful, they may show how to stave off many frailties of old age.
Glenn and his crew are not alone on the shuttle.
Two oyster toadfish are on board. Their balance organs are nearly to identical humans', and scientists will try to decipher nerve impulses from those organs as the fish adjust to weightlessness, and then readjust to gravity.
Student experiments on board are packed with brine shrimp, and a garden full of seeds: wheat, chia, cucumber, lettuce, cicoria, tomato, rye grass, bluegrass, black-eyed Susan, corn, oats, barley, lentils and sunflowers.
DuVal High School in Lanham will study the effects of space travel on the life cycle of cockroaches. Woodmore Elementary in Mitchellville is teamed with a school in Argentina studying the effects of microgravity on the germination and growth of grass and crop seeds.
And if floating cockroaches and toadfish don't seem odd enough, a New York manufacturer of flavors and fragrances has teamed up with the University of Wisconsin at Madison to see whether weightlessness can produce any alluring new scents.
International Flavors and Fragrances is orbiting a flowering plant in a climate-controlled growth chamber. Astronauts will draw samples of plant oils from the flowers. The company will later analyze them to see whether microgravity produced chemical changes that could yield unexpected new fragrances.
"Companies like IFF are always looking for new natural sources of flavors and fragrances that consumers haven't experienced before," said Norman Draeger, of the Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics. "This latest exotic place where they haven't looked before happens to be space."
Pub Date: 10/30/98