Transcripts For CSPAN John Glenn Dead At 95 20161211

I encourage all seniors in high school, students in high school, middle schoolers, to use this platform to raise your voice. Your generation deserves to be. Eard in the government i think my advice for the , really on the fence look into community and see what is affecting those around you. They are the ones you see the most. Issue that you see happen every day on the street, that is where you can start. Be a part of this documentary because you want to be a voice for your community. Thank you for all of your device. If you want more information on our contest, go to our website, studentcam. Org. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. Thursday, retired astronaut john glenn died at the age of 95. The ohio born native was known as an American Hero in the eyes of many after becoming the first u. S. Astronaut to orbit the earth in 1962. 40 years later, he spoke about the mission. This is one hour and 20 minutes. John dailey good evening, ladies and gentlemen, i am john dailey, and is my privilege to welcome you for a special evening. I wanted to thank the boeing Company Representatives here tonight, mr. Henry stonecipher. You have got a good seat. Im glad to see you are doing ok, terrific. And to thank all of you for the museum, and we worked very hard to make this a special year. You can see tonights event is truly indicative of that. We have tried to make it as personal as possible. Annie glenn thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. 40 years, it is hard to believe. The last flight, i have told more people i lost 12 pounds. I mean, the first flight i lost 12 pounds, because i was really scared. Last flight i put all of them back on again. [laughter] they were so different. Before we begin, my introduction, i would like to, kids. Or you to see our they are grown up now. Back then, glenn was in ninth grade when john was lost, and dave was in fifth grade. They both came back for this special 40th anniversary. She is from minnesota, right here. [applause] annie glenn and our son david and his wonderful wife, dr. Karen peggy strong, and our son david they are back from california. Would you please welcome them . [applause] annie glenn and there is another gentleman here tonight, general tom miller retired, he and his family live next door to us when we were living in arlington at the time of his flight. My two kids and the Miller Family helped me through an awful, awful loss. Helped me through an awful, awful lot. It was, john was our teacher. He took us to different places where he was in training, and we learned so much of what to expect. He helped us to understand what he was going to be doing. Even then, i was scared. So my job is very special. Ohio State University present University President is a nationally recognized leader in higher education. At osu, he leads one of the nations largest distinguished universities with 19 colleges and four regional campuses all dedicated to teaching, research and service. We are proud to have the john glenn Public Policy as a part of the ohio State University family. And this has been a key factor in making that happen. It is off to a wonderfully exciting, great start. Four values guide his presidency, pursuing academic excellence, student experiences, making diversity an international reality, expanding outreach for not only ohio but beyond. A great educator, a great University President. He and his wife patty are very, very good friends of ours, and is my honor to introduce to you dr. Brit kirwan. [applause] dr. Kirwan annie, thank you very much. Among the most pleasant and rewarding tasks i have at the university is working with john and annie glenn. I should refer to annie as professor glenn because she is the adjunct faculty member in our department of speech and hearing sciences. She delivered the keynote address at that departments annual john black symposium 18 months ago. As many of you know, annie has been honored nationally for her work on communicative disorders and for her lifelong efforts on behalf of children, the elderly, and the handicapped. Andy, we at ohio state are blessed to be able to call you annie, we at ohio state are blessed to be able to call you one of our very own. [applause] the other half of this remarkable couple is of course tonights distinguished speaker. All of you are well aware of just how highly the American People regard senator glenn. He is deservedly recognized as one of our nations foremost public servants. Indeed for tens of millions of americans, he is the quintessential American Hero. So you can imagine the special pride we in ohio have for this native son of the buckeye state. How appropriate it was that the senator was asked to carry the American Flag in this winters olympic games. [applause] dr. Kirwan as annie mentioned, we at ohio state are blessed to be the home of the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy and the john glenn archives. The distinguished director of the John Glenn Institute is with us this evening, professor deborah merritt. Deborah, would you please stand . Thank you. [applause] dr. Kirwan inspired by john glenns career and his vision, the institute as having a major impact on our students, faculty, and programs. Just ask the students from the institutes of washington internship program. We are here with the 40th anniversary of his historic flight to hear this distinguished american deliver the 2002 werner von braun memorial lecture. Many of you will recall as i do the enormous sense of National Pride we felt 40 years ago today as we sat glued to our Television Sets to watch after not john glenn to lift off the face of the earth, circumnavigate the globe, and land safely in the ocean. He became of course an instant national hero. Few if any have ever carried universal acclaim and hero status with such grace and humility. Youre all familiar with the mile post along his illustrious career path. His service as a decorated marine corps pilot and recordbreaking test pilot. His service as a mercury astronaut. His successful career in business and his work to protect the environment. His distinguished 24 year career in the United States senate, making him the first ohioan to serve four consecutive terms. And his return to space at, dare i say it, age 77 on nasa shuttle discovery mission. A little over three years ago. What an extraordinary man. What an extraordinary career. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming a National John glenn. [applause] john glenn thank you. [applause] john glenn thank you, thank you, all, very much. Thank you. Thank you, all. [applause] john glenn thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, brit, very much. Sound system, how is it up there . Can you hear all right . Ok, good. Brit of course is no stranger to washington. He was president of the university of maryland for about nine years i think it was. And the did a great job there such a great job that we promoted him to ohio state. [laughter] john glenn i thought i would get some boos out of this crowd on not around this particular area here, but you know host director of the air and space museum general jack daly who i have known in the marine corps and nasa days and now here at the air and space museum. I dont know what his problem was i think he probably got so excited about the olympics he tried to play 20yearold again, and it didnt work. [laughter] jack, we wish you a speedy recovery. I know thats a painful thing to have happen your achilles tendon go out for you then a verse or a hard to believe. From a nine i guess the other factors involved there were brought home to me a short time ago when i got a letter from a young man nine years of age in illinois. And i wont give you his exact name, but this is actual letter its not a not something i made up. It said it said, dear mr. Glenn. Hi, im andrew and i wont give his last name i am nine years old. Im in the third grade at lyons school. I wish you could come. Just recently i had to do a biographer you report, and i picked you because i wanted to learn about the First American to orbit the earth. I loved reading about your life. When i had to do my presentation, i made a poster and dressed up like an astronaut. I have a question for what it was like to be shot at in a plane and what are you working on now. This is the part that i liked. Im glad youre still alive because a lot of my classmates biography choices are already dead. I hope you write back. [laughter] [applause] john glenn that letter got the most prompt reply my office ever sent out, i guarantee it. [laughter] john glenn it just seems like 40 days instead of 40 years ago, and it has been vividly impressed on me from back at the time of the flight but also been recalled so often since that is remain just very fresh in my mind remembering how things felt and looked and so on. But when i talk with jack about what we might speak about tonight, he suggested we do sort of a retrospective here on some things that maybe have not been as much in the public press as some of the other factors like youve seen on the screen here when we came in the saving and things like that. So i wont go back on that kind of a thing, but i do want to bring out some of the things i hope our little more unusual with regard to our training, our selection, our training, and so on, but first id like to just pause for a moment here to help us all understand the mood of those days back in the early 1960s and why some of those decisions were made. And for an international backdrop, it goes Something Like this. We came out of world war ii, and our peace at that time was very shortlived. We went into the korean war. And worldwide communism was on the march. It was the days of joe mccarthy, and i have here in my pocket the name of 200 communists in the state department. Some of your old enough to remember those days. Hollywood writers were being blacklisted. Soviet military equipment was going to third world countries, and Senate Hearings were prolific about not only mccarthy but what was happening to us. The soviets had already taken let via, lithuania, estonia, parts of poland, finland, romania. They controlled the governments of both radio, czechoslovakia, east germany, hungary, poland, romania, and north korea. And they were local communist governments had taken over in yugoslavia, albania, north vietnam. They were very strong communist parties in france and italy. China had already gone communist before 1989 with 20 of the human race. And lest we doubted their sincerity about what they were trying to do, the soviets crushed revolts in east germany and 53 and in hungary in 1956. Now with that background, we had always considered ourselves to be a leader in the world in science and technology and we were. We were recognized forthose areas. But now the soviets claim to that was their technical superiority in the world should follow their. Their lead. And they were making hay with this. And they were taking students by the thousands and taking them to russia and moscow and training them and bringing them back to their countries. Their International Trade fairs kruschev was saying, we will bury you. And it wasnt long after all this before the bay of pigs disaster. So the soviets had gained tremendous credibility. No longer looked at as those crazy bolsheviks over there at each other. This was something a very very serious for the United States, and there were many in this country that, for the longterm know whether we could be certain, didnt of just exactly what was going to happen. Now, that is the time in which the space race was born, and khrushchev, when they had made their First Successful launch, we had failed to do the same thing, said that with their new boosters, he quoted socialism has triumphed not only fully but irreversibly. So thats where the space race started. The soviets were going to space to prove their superiority. And they said so. We were trying, and too often we were failing. And that was too bad also. They had orbited sputnik, the first orbital vehicle around the earth which the model of which is up in the hall at that center hall outside there if you look up toward the balcony area. The exact model of it. Went up on the fourth of october 1957, beeping its way around the world, and khrushchev once again said the u. S. Now sleeps under a soviet moon. We tried to counter just a few months later in december with vanguard, and it blew up after a forefoot lift off the pad. And we remember some of those pictures very, very well. So with that background, enter the manned program. So its tensions were brought to a new level. Lines were drawn. And the space race was underway. The media concentrated mainly on the race aspects of it. I always thought that it was something after people had looked up for tens of thousands of years and wondered what was up there was something that once we develop the capability to do this, it would have happened some time anyway, but the impetus for it back at that time was certainly the space race. Now we had the ability to learn know, and it was going to be of great, great value, space race or not. President was kennedy looked at as a Space President , still is because of his decision to send the people to the moon. But i think many have overlooked some of the role that, part of the role the general that president eisenhower played because he made some very key decisions. He originally had not been much impressed with sputnik, thought it was a stunt or than anything else, and really amount of a whole lot and said so publicly. But it was his decision then when he reversed his mind on this and decided this was very important, the change of the naca, the old National Advisory committee for aeronautics, became the new National Aeronautics and space administration. And he wanted a manned program. He didnt want to be a military one to contrast it with the soviets, wanted to be an open program. Didnt want to be the program of the air force, had proposed out of Edwards Air Force base the old misprogrammed man in space soonest. He went with mercury and nasa mainly because it could be done sooner. Because time was of the essence back in those days. And instead of setting out a group of people from which the astronauts would be selected out of a group of perhaps divers and parachutists, racers, explorers, submarines, daredevils of one kind or another, you decide he decided the military test pilots were qualified to do the job since it operated in small cockpits and high speeds and so on. There are about 110 people qualified to meet the conditions that were set down. 32 were selected for a physical and selection process. Out of that process came the seven mercury astronauts now. Some of these things we went through back then i thought might be of interest and a little more detail. But the physical out of loveless was very mundane. It was what you would expect out of any physical except it was the most extensive physical. As far as we knew that had ever been given to any group like that. Blood samples, urine, body fat, barium, exercise, balance, spirometer, it i, year, nose, throat. You ever tried to blow water in the air . I remember that one very vividly. Cold water in the air, long enough, you fill your vestibular negative zone. And there are different temperatures in different parts, you get stagnant so bad, the inability to focus your eye on any one thing. You become very, very dizzy. They time you how long it took you to settle down from that. [laughter] john glenn another one i have never seen any where done before or since is, we went to wrightpatterson, Wrightpatterson Air Force base for additional checks they wanted to run on us. They did anthropomorphic studies. Human beings had different body types. Some of you are doctors can give me a verse on that, but ectomorph and mesomorph are the three different. Basic body types which are slender, sort of average, and tending to be overweight. Well, measures in these areas, and i never did know why this was of value, they had a stand like this with our legs apart like this, arms out like this and stand very still. They took pictures from every angle you can consist of from right between our feet straight up to head down, right and left, forward and backward. Now i thought those may be interesting for somebody in the archives some time to look at, but i was brought home to me that this was not something i should have taken so lightly. When at a political rally in the dayton area, not too long after i had been in the senate, a woman came up to me and said i probably know more about you the then you know about yourself. She was one charged with making all the measurements of those pictures that we had sent in. I immediately left her, havent seen her since, dont want to see her since. [laughter] john glenn at wrightpatterson, we went through some additional checks that nobody goes through now, and Isolation Chamber and an echo chamber. In a chamber without telling us how long were going to be in there, separately one at a time with the skin sensors on, alert you are going to be or how long youre going to be and. No light no sound. There you sat on a chair, and that was it. That is you are supposed to stay alert. But i did i thought thats what they wanted us to do, although i didnt say. They just want to see the reaction you got they got on that when i went down through a desk drawer a found what i thought was a pad of paper leaf through it. And i thought there was a blank page and sat there with a pencil, i happened to have in my pocket, doing a little dog poetry. Which was a good exercise because you had to remember what went before to make it rhyme. And did that and i have they found it took me out after about four and a half hours, but the the poetry was never published a year. Heat chamber, running body temperature up. 135 degrees. Sound chamber, they could change frequency, all kinds of different strength of sound. You actually would get a harmonic on a bone, get a harmonic on the bone length to wear your bone sort of tickled, and they had sound running on it. You were getting a reaction to where it reverberated inside your body light pulse, certain light sensitivities of some people would if you had a certain strobe, a certain number of cycles per second, some people would be particularly sensitive to different frequencies, and it might interfere with their whole nervous system. So we were put in this where they could have light pulses that were dimmer be dimmer or stronger. They would run the frequency up and down and did us at 10 cycles per second. Seemed to be debilitating to some people theyd run a lot of tests on this. And some people really would sort of phase out a little bit and their abilities at 10 cps. I found 10 cps sort of more irritating than the others, but fortunately i didnt really phase out. And then we were introduced to there for the first time was the centrifuge, they had a 25 foot human centrifuge. That would be what is expected for launch and reentry on project mercury. Pressure chamber run, but this was done differently. Pressure chamber run was done where you go up in normal Pressure Chamber you go up until you are in space or highaltitude, breathing oxygen of course, but instead of letting it down gently as they normally do, they brought it down at approximately the same rate as though you were coming back in from space. And you were supposed to vent out your ears as a pressure built up, of course, and this was important for this reason. When you make your reentry from space, as you come back in, as we were to come back in in that mercury spacecraft, you would be going straight down once you had decelerated and you were falling into the bigger part of the atmosphere. If you are going supersonic, straight down with a helmet on, and you couldnt get in a twitch your nose to nose, its just you couldnt get into it. So you are there doing like we all do in airliners with making your chin go and making your nose go back and forth and trying to make pressure go back into your years. That was a different one than we had ever had before. Psychological tests are interesting too, and they want to do those because. I think it was a good reason for that because it had some indications from submariners and from people in the antarctic on some projects down there of, when youre in isolation for a lengthy period of time, you may have enough sensory deprivation that you develop anxiety depression, even psychosis. And they didnt want anyone up in a spacecraft with psychosis. So they gave us all sorts of tests. The first we know was just a plain iq test, and it remained a secret to what was good or bad. Then there were multiple questionnaires, teams of psychiatrists doing this. I dont know how many rorschach inkblot tests we went through, but there were dozens of them at different times, what do you think this looks like . To me they always looked like birds or butterflies, one of the other. But i think i was reminded of a joke that was going around back at that time. That a psychiatrist who had a patient, he showed them some of these rorschach ink, afghan what he thought of that. And the patient launched into the most lurid details of pornographic activity like you wouldnt believe. And on and on and on and on he finally got a fellow stopped and he showed him the same picture, he goes into the pornographic thing again. Away they go. This went on about 10 times. Finally the psychiatrist is getting a little disgusted. After all this at he end seen anything except all this pornographic things that he had described in great detail. So he finally said, why do you respond that way . And the patient said, dont blame me, doc, youre the one showing the dirty pictures. [laughter] john glenn there were some other ones that were interesting too. When you go home, take out a piece of paper and write down the answer 20 times two who am i . You will find you can do a lot of things at that time like i am a husband, i am a father, i am a marine, i am a pilot, i am a so, i am a soandso, i am a member of something else. And you get up to about fifteen or 16 times, it is hard to get those last four or five. We met through all of these things. And there were pictures of, they would say draw picture of your choosing that would illustrate truth or honesty. That is good and abstract. And karen, whos a clinical psychologist may make something out of this, but those were things that we didnt know how to analyze at that time, so you just went along and did the best job you could. Now one of pete conrad, some of you know him here, pete was a great guy and one of the finest astronauts we ever had. He was just, had just an irrepressible attitude and sense of humor. That was great and this actually happened with pete. And he was in with one of the psychiatrist one day and the psychiatrist put out a plain white piece of paper just like that across to pete and said, what do you see . And that pete looked at it and said, well, the first thing i see is you got it upside down. [laughter] john glenn that could have had something with pete not being selected in the first group. [laughter] john glenn but he was selected in the next group that went through and eventually wound up going to the moon, and had a great flight there. After all of these tests, we were selected and announced in april 1959, announced the seven. Spacecraft was still being defined, and i think some of that is interesting. We were behind in our ability to go into space. Because we were better than the soviets were technically. Sounds backwards. Sounds very backwards except you have to remember that the boosters we were using were ones designed for Nuclear Weapons. We had been able to miniaturize Nuclear Weapons at that time or make them much smaller because we were better technically. They had not been able to do that. They had still had Nuclear Weapons weighing in the thousands of pounds. Thousands of pounds, so they had to develop a larger booster. Now when the Space Program turn. Came around to where were going to send manned spacecraft up. , they had an advantage they could practically put their house up if they wanted to at that time while we could just get up a little bit over 4000 pounds, and that was the max. So to do that the mercury spacecraft such as you see out there, friendship seven out in the hall outside, we were trying to save every single pound that we possibly could, and it was only a one person spacecraft. It was a light structure. They even went with 100 oxygen environment, because that give you the same oxygen absorption at 27,000 feet with only five psi inside. You went with lower pressure, 100 oxygen, like you have the same oxygen intake that we have here on earth. That way, you could build a lighter spacecraft, did not need the structure because it was only five psi incident of the higher pressure you would want out there in the vacuum of space. The original spacecraft had no window except for a little port hole way over here on the left. You can just tell whether it was light or dark out of that. Early on, the powers that be and nasa and people running the program agreed that we should put in a window, so they put a window in that came right up over the astronautss head. They used to call it a capsule. I have referred to that already a couple of times here we later. Of times here. We later came around to describing it as a spacecraft. Bob hope said it was the first time in history a capsule had taken a man. [laughter] john glenn another thing that people were surprised about is originally nasa had a rule that prohibited any camera from being on board. It could be automatic, but they were very much afraid if you had a handheld camera that it might distract you enough that you wouldnt Pay Attention to what you were supposed to be paying attention to. I thought that was a little bit ridiculous because, if we are going to be that bad, badly bent out of shape psychologically, we probably shouldnt go up there to begin with. So he finally agreed also that we have to take a camera, and so were searching for a camera one that would we could make a a pistol grip on that could you could trigger and use that motion to advance the film. We hadnt settled on a camera yet. There was a leica that we wanted, and i was downtown in cocoa beach one day, at a drugstore, happened to see on the drugstore camera a brandnew new type camera with automatic exposure which was brand new at that time, little minolta camera. And it was one that looks like we could probably use for a handgrip, so i bought it for 45 and took it out. We adapted it in the machine shop. Nasa did not have a photo shop at that time. Adapted it, and that was the, that was the little camera that took what i believe are the first pictures, handheld the dust storms in the Atlas Mountains and those pictures have been pretty well distributed. Nasa has not reimbursed me for this day. [laughter] where are you here . I know hes here he was here a little while ago. But anyway, we went into training, different types of training, physical training. John glenn pretty much standard, you have all seen those i am sure. There were some different types of training we went into because they work sure of what we were getting into in this new environment of space. And so they put us through some training to things that did not have to be done that arent done now. But at that time, they thought it was safer to do these things. They didnt want to leave any stone unturned if we were going into space. We had a slowly revolving room down in pensacola where they do seasick studies down there. Dr. Graybill, he was the worlds greatest expert on motion sickness they had a room that. Sat in there and slowly revolved. Now you didnt know that from looking at it. You had no sensation until you started to move yourself. In your head went when you started to throw something across the room, you had to arc it like this no go like that and go across the room want to curve. Because the room was turning. One of the tests was to take a soft ball and try to throw it across the room about 10 feet or 12 feet into a wastebasket. If you threw it at the wastebasket, it arced off this way. So you had to throw it this way. It was to give you as many fouled up to use, cross qs, as you could possibly get. The body was one, your field was another every time you move your head, you got a different sensation in this thing, so that was very, we trained they dont use that for training anymore. We didnt know what the human body could take on a centrifuge. What, how many gs could you take . Where did you stop operating . If this ran into high gs or there was some error so we went up to the Naval Air Development Center where they had a 50 foot human centrifuge up there. They could mount a capsule, a similar thing at the end of this 50 foot arm. If you went out there, and you were at the 50 foot arm on the end of it, and you are lying down in the bottom of this, it will turn around like this. As it went around, it turned up like that so that your body was taking the gs out here and we got up, we rode that thing at lower levels first, but finally got up to 16 gs. And that is a gutbuster. I never want to do that again. But al shepard and Gordon Cooper and i were the three that did that. At 16, even in that supine position where the gs are being taken in this direction, you had to just tense every muscle as hard as you could to take enough blood in your head to keep from passing out. And we got at that point, it was getting tenuous enough we didnt push it any further because wed probably just blacked out at that point. But those were runs that i and we sort of set the parameters on what people could and could not do. Now another variation of that was one that was very, very interesting, and that was somebody had come up with the idea that if you are on a mission, and you are coming down, on a parachute hanging down, and your spacecraft hit the land, your parachute will detach. If you are coming down and there is high wind, you hit and this gives down on the small end, obviously you come out of the couch and hit the straps that are keeping you in the seat. So they decided we should go up and make some runs on whether we could take that or whether we needed better body restraint than just the two straps down over your shoulders. So we went up and made what we called the tumble runs or eyeballs in to eyeballs out. What we did was got out on the end of that, and they would start the machine. Would,went around, they in three seconds, you would reverse this capsule out on the s went from your gee in to out. Tests we did were not where the doctors did them ahead of us. Not one, for some reasons, one of the doctors were working ahead of that one. Gs. T up to five he was doing this 55. At the end of the run, he was breathless. The doctors had one of these large anthropomorphic dummies. They kept turning this dummy. What they determined happened was the heart was moving around like this and was hitting one to take the air out of it. We terminated the tests at that point. Those are some a great experiences some great experiences to look back to. You have these small ruptures under the skin. On the tumble runs, when we hit the straps, you could see where the straps were when you took your suit off. Another one that they did not know if we had a runaway spacecraft, getting faster and faster, where does the astronaut phaseout . The nasa laboratory in cleveland, it was multi axis Space Training inertia facility. Across, huge, 15 feet one gimbal, each gimbal was different. Middlekpit right in the of this. They could turn it loose. It was heavy control it. A little instrument panel. Like you can see on the one on friendship seven on the floor. They would combine the. Raduation exercise was 30 rpm you wouldw understand why the thing became known as the barf machine. [laughter] they do not do those tests now because they did not prove to useful. Useful. Do prove too we would do scuba training, training at the planetarium in North Carolina at chapel hill. Did some zero g g training. Cabin. E float in the that way you can get about 30 seconds of weightlessness as long as they hold that exact parabolic flight. We did a number of those runs also. Those are just some of the things we did on training, the most of which we do not do anymore. We were trying to cover every base. If you had to make an emergency reentry, that was going to be an interesting situation. We did not have emergency crews everywhere to pick you up. Anywhere in the world, you could be the death by a crew within you could be up by a crew within 72 hours. Were we got training as to what you would do in a particular situation. We were going to go across subsaharan and central africa, the australian outback, and going across the spine of pop and new guinea Papua New Guinea. Let me skip forward a couple of years. Asked by i were president carter to take a delegation to the Solomon Islands when they were getting their independence. We had a couple of days to spend wer in Papua New Guinea and went up in the hills were there was a missionary who had found this tribe that had never been contacted before. They had a plane where we could land on a strip going into the jungle. We went over to this village, walked a couple of miles down through a jungle to get to this village. The missionary, the natives, them,e first contacted they had no written language and the missionary got their confidence and he spent years there. I believe it was seven years. He had written out the new testament in their language phonetically and they liked him and we came into the village and he had mistakenly told them i had been to the moon. Because when ior got into the village, it turns out that in their old animistic religion, they look at the moon and they thought all of the spirits of the dead whatever, all of the spirits went to the moon, the spirits were white and that is the reason the moon was white and nobody had ever come back. And he told them i have been to the moon and come back. You can imagine the reception we had in that particular village. It was phenomenal. There was another aspect that was interesting. When this was shortly after our bicentennial and i had taken one of the golden medallions from the bicentennial with a red ribbon on it and i presented this to him as a gift. He took his feathered neck dress off and some beads and he gave that to me. I thought it was to use when i was in the village. It was something he wanted to wanted me to take with me. It is one of my very most prized possessions. Saidve me this back and he when he was young man, they used to fight all the time with other tribes and he pointed to his arms and he had scar tissue. Eat we would stop, we would parts of each other. I was talking to a real live cannibal in his younger days. He said, we dont do that now and it is much better. [laughter] i did not know whether to laugh or cry. Something the missionary had brought their as a whole new way of life. We did Survival Training and jungle training and we did that donna desert im sorry, down in the jungles of southern colombia. We went down to the jungle canopy with the helicopter. Neil armstrong and i camped out for three days in this wet rain forest, very difficult to deal with that. Another thing about emergency reentry, and this one i found interesting, imagine you are coming down and making an emergency reentry and here you are, anybody down there below you have heard a boom, a sonic boom. ,ere comes the big parachute hits the ground, and any people and there is another bang and you blow the hatch off this thing and out stepped something in a silverstein in a silver suit. There is a good chance you will be dead or elected chief very fast. I thought it would be a good idea to be able to communicate with these people and i drew up a message and we sent it to some of the linguists. Likely dialectt of some of these remote languages along the track and put it down phonetically so i would have a message if i had to make an emergency reentry and came down in one of those places. Me to your leader, big reward, things like that. [laughter] one of the interesting things that came out of that on a many ofious note those languages, the word for stranger and the word for enemy is the same word. If you do not know somebody, they are an enemy. If you got to know them a little bit, they are probably a friend. I think there is a big message there for all of us. The doctors had some ideas about what we might run into, how the eyeballs might change shape in weightlessness. Ofyou look on the upper part the instrument panel, you will see a tiny vision chart. I was to read every 20 minutes during flight. We had heart checks, ekgs, and we put that on some any times during training. One time i told bill douglas, there should be some marking on the skin so we always did on the same spot. He thought that was a good idea and he took his scalpel and just roughed up the skin a little bit and to this day, i have a little here, and here, here, down here. We have the reliability of having the same spot. The 11tht went on schedule date, i suited up for the times four times. Go for 7. Nd got the that was the lingo we used at the control center. We are up there and i am ready to go to work. Many of you probably remember the comedian who back in the old days had this character he portrayed as being a reluctant astronaut. This that became quite popular among the astronauts and we used to kid each other. Bill had this one routine, because there had been some animals sent up on different tests, ill have this whole routine where he felt so sorry for the leetle mouse. He went on with that and every time we would have some tough test, someone would say, i just feel like the leetle mouse. I was in space just east of bermuda. I thought it was time to get to work and a timeline, reached over to my right, pulled up the velcro flap and floating out of mouse. Ame the leetle it had al shepard written all over it, i guarantee you that. I guess we all needed a little tension breaker. It was a perfect thing. That is one of my more prized possessions. We had some problems. Automatic control system problem, the heat shield problem. Fastforward to 1996, we were preparing for some debate in the senate on nasa budgeting. I had noted that nasa had been spaceflightsd since 1962. They noted about 52 different changes that occur in the human body. There were nine of those in particular that stood out to me because there are things that happen to the elderly as you age on earth. There were things such as osteoporosis. For the young people up on up in space, cardiovascular changes, protein turnover, protein replacement, coordination changes, less resistant to disease and infection, sleep patterns change. Nutrient absorption becomes different. These happened to the younger astronauts and they recover. When those things happen to you as you are aging on earth, you do not get any better. Ofa doctors never thought sending someone older up there to see what the reaction would be. The idea was, could we find out by looking at the differences between the elderly and the younger people . Could, we could make it possible for the younger astronauts to make longer flights and the elderly on earth, relieve the elderly of some of the frailties of oldage. They put that out for study for over a year. For truly, i was able to qualify physically fortunately, i was able to qualify physically. The National Institute of aging interest is obvious. We had 34 million americans over 65 and that is due to go over 100 million by the year 2050. If we can make some breakthroughs in that particular area, we can keep the younger people up in space longer without having some of these harmful effects and maybe erase the frailties of oldage right here on earth. Database ofe have a one. Hopefully, down the year down the road, we will have sent more people in this age bracket up there so we had a database that is much more meaningful to scientists. We lifted off on discovery, that is by design, a longer entry period. Equivalent equipment could not take nine gs without building without being built much heavier. You have a longer period going up. Same thing coming back in. You start your entry at about 9000 miles away. Improved measurably. Immeasurably. In theic square feet french of seven, the shuttle has about 2500 square feet in the friendship seven, the shuttle has about 2500 square feet. About i am always asked body functions when i give a talk at a school. The kids always want to know about that. In the old days, we did not have that problem. It went into a plastic bag. Now you have a system that is almost like what you have it home. You are still weightless while you are in their. While you are in there. You have springloaded handles to hold you down and when you get ready to take care of your business, you pull a handle and it slides a thing out from under you and starts airflow into the toilet. Otherwise, things the mission of the whole had changed to the years. We are now invested in mainly basic fundamental research. It is not just going up to see if we can do it, which was the mission of friendship seven and was now going up with Different Research projects. They would make special measurements on the sun. The spartan spacecraft. Some bio micro molecular studies of biology and rice samples and some things like that. So it went the whole of the whole gamut of things. America has been a curious questing nation. Weve learned a new in the unknown first we push back the frontiers of knowledge more than any nation in history. And in our democratic system we put it to work. We created jobs. New industries. New standards a Healthy Living and become the envy of the world. If theres one thing weve learned its basic research usually has a way of paying off in the future. More than anything we can see at the outset. And that has been true throughout history. Whether it is sir Alexander Fleming curious about mold. Out of his curiosity comes penicillin. And the beginning of the whole antibiotics industry, and changing of Life Expectancy around the world. Jefferson sends lewis and clark off through america. Disraeli the british Prime Minister supposed to be in the laboratory wednesday with and hes is what good is it . And ferriday says what good is a baby . Immediateoesnt have use, but fit something later, it lets us make a quantum leap forward in whatever it is. In the spacecraft, protein crystal growth is being done with a purity and size you cant do here on earth and thats useful in the study of pharmaceuticals in the medical people so. Theyre always there always doubters. But if theres one thing i think weve learned that we are well served by money spent on research. Obviously were not going to turn all our money over to research. But we can certainly put enough of it in to make use of that space station up there now i think better than were doing because its been cut back now and i know we have to get our finances under control and things like that but it was designed for six or seven people right now were able to maintain three people up there so the amount of research until we can get the other three people up there doing research is going to be curtailed from what it could have been. This is the first time we have ever had a chance to get into this kind of research and space. I think is going to be one of the most valuable. We said we have a time period for q and a tonight. Maybe we can get to that right now. [applause] we will start with two questions here. I was wondering what your thoughts were as you are going back into space for the second time. You said and how does that compare to that your most recent experience . It was a very different type of flight and i must say a different confidence level too. Because the first time up it was a little bit, you know we had to we had not had a perfect flight record on the some of the boosters before that time. But this time around wed had 100 tournament flights and only one failure. Coming back into the atmosphere and high heat out ahead of a 9000 degrees out three or four feet in front the heat shield itself is about 3000 degrees. So you are dealing with things like that. This time up we had a much greater experience level than we had the first time up. My talking into the tape recorder, i didnt do as much of that as i had planned before. I was so interested in what was going on the stage and each thing you hear and feel going up so i have that tape but its not particularly valuable i dont think you and i think it hadnt been told a hundred times before. In the right stuff from you depicted in reentry a bunch of garbage. [laughter] tom wolfe in the book i thought did a good job in the book i enjoyed the book i hope we dont have a movie producers here if we do it is too bad because i just saw it when they got hooked up with it and they hammed it up badly enough that it didnt. Call a lot of relationship to reality and the problem was they had advertised that movie as almost being a documentary of the early space days. But i was not singing and i was working my tail off coming back in. Because the automatic system was out i had flown that went out the end of the first orbit. I got in manual i was flying the thing manually. And during that time period coming back in or oscillations building up and i was trying to damp them out. And i was working very very hard the last thing i was doing was sitting there saying to myself singing to myself. They just made that one up. Now another one in there, they had the fireflies. That be from a campfire in australia where the aborigines have a cap higher and the sparks were coming clear up into space. Any High School Physics you know that just doesnt happen. I appreciate the symbolism of all this, of aborigines to the latest scientific move and the connection sparks and that was what it was supposed to be i guess because even in hollywood they know sparks cant get up that high. You are nn, wondering if perhaps one of the reasons that aurora seven might have gone over a middle a little bit less could have been because commander carpenter only had six weeks to get ready and maybe didnt trace of much as just get ready for friendship seven. I dont think that was the case at all. E all had trained very hard any one of the seven could have gone on any mission. We were all adequately trained to do it. There was a misalignment of the spacecraft as best they could determine where when they better workers were fired. Member if youre traveling almost five miles a Second Coming each second in error give you five miles off, and any misalignment would also give you the improper vectored to get you down where they thought you were coming down or planned for you to come down. It does not take much arab there to give a considerable distance off. In those days, you took a ballistic reentry. Whatever your retrovirus. From then on, it was ballistic from then on. You had no control over where youre going to land. And in fact you set up a radar rotation so if there was a little misalignment between the center of pressure on the heat shield and the center of gravity if those two are off a little that off, she keeled over like a plane. The use that later in apollo to do exactly that to control to a more precise landing. We actuallyry, after retro fire set up a radar rotation so that there was any misalignment, it didnt take it off someplace, it would all be or equaled out as you rotated coming down like that so. But it didnt take much air. To get your considerable could you care to rise the relationship between von braun and the astronauts . We worked very well. At the management level, there were some problems. Id think any to talk about those. As far as the astronauts went, we were just trying to get trained and do our job. We visited him at his home a number of times. Von braun was a very very unique person and a very capable person. I think he had a characteristic that a lot of people have that ive been able to through being known and traveling around the world some weve had the opportunity to meet a lot of people whove done a lot of great things. And it seems to me that most people that have that characteristic have another characteristic they have an inordinate large curiosity about everything around theyre just curious about everything. We first were invited to go to dinner the first time we went to huntsville. And von braun asked us up for dinner and so we went up to his home up on the hill. And i expected when he walked into the library that here would be all the books on engineering and math and orbital mechanics and all this type stuff and that would be it. Instead of that when i went in his library for the first time. Here were all the books on religion and ethics and philosophy and a few books on math and science and things like that. But his library was mainly filled up by other things. He was a very broad gauged person and ask him about religion or philosophy and you were in for a two hour discussion. So i enjoyed being with him and i think the other astronauts did too. And if they were management problems with one center and another and headquarters and so on well that was their problem and we really were not involved with that at our level. Back to the planetarium. Senator glenn i want to thank you for coming out today. Appreciate it. Can you show us the four black spots on your body . [laughter] i would like if he could quickly to just discuss your memories of gus grissom, your relationship to him and anything else you might add about gus. Gus and i were close and he was there was no more dedicated person than gus. He was a tiger at working at things and keeping in shape. We were good friends. In houston we built homes that , were just not too far apart. We were sidebyside and back on the street just about a hundred yards away. We were all in a sort of area there. That was really a tragic loss. It came as i think looking back on it obviously it was a mistake to have 100 oxygen environment. I have to do is remember your High School Physics where you had a beaker of oxygen and you had a just a little red hot wire and you dipped the wire in there and remember the wire metal burns when you put it in there. Well the mistake that was made that thing as near as they can determine is that you had some paper inside there or maybe the paper should have been in there. And there was a spark came out they think from the test they were on, and that 100 oxygen environment, what that spark at the paper, that was it. Practically explosive. Those were three fine people that were lost that time. Not only goss gus, but roger chafee and ed white. Just outstanding folks so that lasts loss nasa had before the challenger accident. Gus was a good friend and he is still messed to this day. All of the questions of our have dealt with the past about the future. What is next for any and john glenn . Im just trying to keep up with annie. I suggested we should try to go back as a couple into space. Lest you think this is something im coming to with you one of shee days for everyone, only has one caveat to this she was to be up there and she was to look down and see everything up there, she just doesnt want to go through the launch. No seriously one of the things were doing of course was mentioned earlier in the introduction here the center of the institute for Public Service Public Policy at state ohio. I felt for the last fifteen years or so that we had so much cynicism and apathy of many of our young people toward anything to do with government and politics that it could be a hazard for the future. Seriously. Because our democracy depends upon people participating. And if we all went down the mall here and across the archives building went and look there sits the constitution. Hand writ. There it is its the greatest single document on governments ever put forward in all human history. And yet we might as well take it out in front burn it on the front steps unless we have that unless we have people willing to try and take those words off paper and make them come real for everybody in this country. Everybody not just a favored few. But everybody thats what democracy is all about. Not a communist type thing. [applause] politicsys looked at has been the Personnel Department for the constitution and i think its every bit that. I have a wonderful teacher in high school. He made civics come alive. It was a study of government and politics. I just looked forward to going to his classes. Never but i would be up to run myself, but did later on by circumstances. We are working very hard on this thing at ohio state. I think september 11 helped rekindle some of this interest of our young people. Now how do we keep that going . Debbie over here is doing a great job of our outreach program. We have coworked with our colleagues at the Kellogg Foundation and put out a Service Learning before that. Take riley had asked me to head math and Science Teaching in the 21st century. To do that, and some of the things we found there were just frightening as far as education goes. , the Third International math and science study showed that rating their kids come up to about the fourth grade our kids rate in the top two or three nations in the world. When they get out of high school, our kids are two or three from the bottom out of 41 nations. School of the message is never majored or minored in math and sells. They say that teach math next year. They are barely ahead of the kids. Same thing and science. 25 in math are that way. 20 in science. Never studied it. And yet were expecting to teach it. And we came out with a whole string of things we made suggestions on for how we correct this. I wont have time to go into those tonight. Were doing things like that working with the institute up there. And theyre still doing some things here in washington we are inches in. We want to thank you for what has been an amazing evening. And having you share your experiences with us once again. I have one thing i would like to do here for tonight. You have been a wonderful audience tonight. We appreciate that. In the spirit of the last week or so, we thought we up to rate the audience tonight. So family, stand up if you will. Ok. [applause] senator, thank you very much. Take any of them, well see. Is interesting since you are a key player in the space race that we are presenting you tonight with some russian laser art that depicts the first flight of the wright brothers. This is a limited edition and were pleased that youre are the first to receive this. Thank you. [applause] we want to thank the boeing company for the sponsorship. Without the sponsorship, these types of events would not be possible. We are indebted to you. There will not be an autograph opportunity this evening. We ask that you exit via the resource of the theater. Thank you for supporting our program this evening. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning instit