Discovery's October 1998 flight captured the public imagination like few missions of its era, carrying John Glenn back into space at the age of seventy-seven. Thirty-six years after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, the former astronaut and senator returned as a research subject, letting scientists study the parallels between spaceflight and aging in an unprecedented experiment.
Around that headline, the crew of seven ran a full program of science in a Spacehab module and deployed and retrieved a free-flying solar telescope. The international crew included the first Spanish astronaut and a returning Japanese researcher. Glenn's flight blended genuine science with a powerful story of a pioneer's return, drawing an audience to the programme reminiscent of the early space age he had helped create.
John Glenn went back. Thirty-six years after Friendship 7, at the age of 77, the senator from Ohio strapped into Discovery and became the oldest human being to reach space — a record he held for two decades. The public response was the largest since Apollo; something like a quarter of a million people came to the Cape, and the launch drew the biggest television audience the Shuttle ever had.
The criticism was loud and not unfair. Plenty of scientists called it a stunt, a reward to a well-connected politician who had voted on NASA's budget. NASA's answer was that ageing and spaceflight produce strikingly similar effects — bone loss, muscle wasting, sleep disruption, immune changes — and that Glenn, with a 1962 baseline and a 1998 one, was a uniquely instrumented subject. He wore sensors day and night and gave blood without complaint.
The flight had its scares — a drag chute door fell away during ascent, hitting nothing — and its genuine science, including a deployed and retrieved solar observatory and a Spanish rookie, Pedro Duque, working alongside Japan's Chiaki Mukai. But the lasting image is of an old man's face at a window, having gone back to a view he had first seen when the machine that took him was small enough to wear.
