itself. the helicopter takes him to the "randolph" for a debriefing and examination by a medical man. the helicopter no southeastern touches down on deck than glenn gets a preview of the congratulations that are still to come. on every hand there is jubilation. on every side smiles and cheers. he signs over his precious log and instruments to the national space administration. from here he goes to grand turks island for further rest before the deluge and deluge of honors, a proud country waits to bestow on a brave man.

ooh 50 years ago, john glenn became the first american astronaut to orbit the earth. next, the former astronaut and u.s. senator on the 40th anniversary in 2002. he spoke at the smithsonian national air and space museum in washington, d.c. this is an hour. >> thank you very, very much for that wonderful introduction. among the most pleasant and rewarding tasks i have at the ohio state university is the privilege of working with john and annie glenn. i should really refer to annie as professor glenn because she's an adjunct faculty member in our department of speech and hearing sciences. indeed she delivered the keynote address at that department's annual john black symposium 18 months ago. as i think many of you know,

annie has been honored nationally for her work on communicative disorders and for her life-long efforts on behalf of children, the elderly and the handicapped. annie, we at ohio state are blessed to be able to call you one of our very own. the other half of this remarkable couple is of course tonight's 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 nation's foremost public servants. indeed, for ten of millions of americans, he is 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 winter's olympic games. as annie mentioned, we at ohio state are blessed to be 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. inspired by john glenn's career and his vision, the institute is having a major impact on our students, faculty and programs. just ask the students from the institute's washington internship program who are here

this evening. we gather this evening on the 40th anniversary of senator glenn's historic flight to hear this distinguished american deliver the 2002 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 astronauts john glenn lift off the face of the earth, circumnavigate the globe, and land safely in the atlantic 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. you're all familiar with the mile post along his illustrious career path, his service as a decorated marine corps pilot and

record breaking 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's 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 hero in 1962, and still a national hero in 2002 -- senator john glenn.

>> thank you. thank you. thank you all very much. thank you. thank you all. thank you, ladies and gentlemen. thank you, brit, very much. sound system -- how is it up there? can you hear all right? okay, good. brit, of course, is no stranger to washington here. he was president of the university of maryland for about nine years, i think it was, and did a great job there, such a great job that we promoted him to ohio state. i thought i'd get some boos out of this crowd on that around this particular area here. but, our host director of the aaron space museum, general jack daily, who i've known in the marine corps and nasa days and now here at the aaron space museum. i don't know what his problem was. i think he probably got so

excited about the olympics he tried to play 20-year-old again and it didn't work. jack? we wish you a speedy recovery. i know that's a painful thing to have happen, your achilles tendon go out. 40th anniversary. hard to believe. 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 9 years of age in illinois. i won't give you his exact name but this is an actual letter. it is not something i made up. it said, dear mr. glenn. hi, i'm andrew db i am 9 years old, i'm in the third grade at lion school. i wish you could come. just recently i had to do a biography 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. this what are you woking on now? this the part that i like. i'm glad you're still alive because a lot of my classmates'

biography choices are already dead. i hope you write back. that letter got the most prompt reply my office ever sent out! i can guarantee you that. actually seems more like 40 days than 40 years ago. it's been vividly impressed on me from back at the time of the flight but often recalled so often since then it remains so fresh in my mind. i recall how the plane felt and looked and so on. when i talked with jack about what we meet speak about tonight, he suggested we do a retrospective on maybe some things that haven't been as much in the public press as other factors like you saw on the screen when we came in here this evening and things like that. i won't go back on this kind of a thing but i do want to bring out some things that i hope are a little more unusual with regard to our training, our selection, our training and so on.

but first, i'd 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 the decisions were made and for an international backdrop, it goes something like this. you know, we came out of world war ii and our peace at that time was very short lived. 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." and some of you are old enough to remember those days. hollywood writers were being black listed. 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 latvia, lithuania, estonia, parts of finland, they controlled other countries and

local communists had taken over in other countries. there were very strong communist parties in france and italy. china had already gone communist before in 1949 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 in '53 and hungary in '56. with that background, we had always considered ourselves to be a leader in the world in science and technology and we were recognized for those areas. but now the soviets claimed that it was their technical superior or the and the world should follow their lead. they were making hay with this. they were taking students by the thousands to russia to moscow and training them and bringing them back again sending them back to their own countries and papers, international journals, extolled the virtues of communism. there were international trade fairs. khruschchev was saying we will

bury you and it wasn't long after the bay of pigs disaster so the soviets gained tremendous credibility. nop lo this was now something very serious for the united states and many in this country for for the long term didn't know whether we could be certain of just exactly what was going to happen. now, that's the nims which the space race was born. khruschchev when they made their first successful launch when we had failed to do the same thing said that with their new boosters, he quoted, socialism has triumphed not only fully but irreversibly. quote. that's where the space race started. the soviets were going to space to prove their superior or the, and they said so. we were trying and too often we were failing. and that was too bad, also. they are orbited sputnik, the first orbital vehicle around the

earth. if you look up toward the balcony area outside, an exact model of it. went up on the 4th of october, 1957, beeping its way around the world and khruschchev 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 four-foot lift off the pad. we remember some of those pictures very, very well. so, with that background enter the manned program. as tensions were brought to a new level, lines were drawn and the space race was under way. the media concentrated mainly on the race aspects of it. i owls thought that it was something that after people had looked up for tens of thousands of years and wondered what was up there, it was something that once we developed the capability to do this, it would have happened some time anyway but the impa teetus for it back at time was certain lit space race. now we had the ability to learn though and it was going to be a great, great value, space race or not. president kennedy was looked at

as the space president, still is because of his decision to send people to the moon. but i think many have overlooked some of the role that -- part of the role 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 more than anything else, didn't really amount to 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 that changed the old national advisory committee for aeronautics became the new national aur natueronautics and administration. he wanted a manned program and didn't want it to be military, wanted it to be contrasted with the soviets. didn't want it to be the program the air force proposed at edwards air force base, 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 us sending out a group of people from which the

astronauts would be selected out of a group of perhaps divers and parachutists, racers, explorers, submariners, daredevils of one kind or another, he decided military test pilots were qualified to do the jobs since they had operated in small cockpits and high speeds and so on. there were about 110 people qualified to meet the conditions that were set down. 32 were selected for physical and selection process and out of that the process came the seven mercury rauns. n astronauts. some of these things i thought be of interest in more detail. physical was very mundane, pretty much what you would expect. urine samples, percent of body fat, barium enema, ekg, stress ekg, exercise, balance, checks for the lung, eye, ear, nose, throat, cold water in the ear?

you ever tried that one? that one -- i remember that one very vividly. cold water in the ear, a long enough running cold water in until your inner mechanism in the ear, the fluid starts moving because of the different temperatures in different parts of it and you get nystagmus so bad which is inability to focus your eye on any one point. it's as if you've been rotated in a chair and become very, very dizzy and they timed how long it took you to settle down from that. another one i've never seen donnie where before , nor since. when we went to wright patterson air force base for some of the additional checks that they wanted to run on us, they did aen throw pormorphic studies. different human beings break down into different body types. some of you who are doctors can give me the three different basic body types -- slender,

sort of average and tending to be overweight. well, they -- to measure us in these areas -- i never did know why this was of value -- they had us stand like that with our legs apart like this, arms out like this and stand very, very still. they took pictures from every angle you could consist of from right between our feet straight up to head-down, to right and left, forward and backward. now i thought those may be interesting for somebody in the archives some time to look at but it 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 than 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 -- i haven't seen her since, don't want to see her since.

at wright patterson we went through some additional checks that nobody goes through now. in an isolation chamber, an chamber without telling us how long we're going to be in there separately. one at a time with skin sensors on to see how alert you were going to be or how long you would be in. no light, no sound. there you sat on a chair at a desk and that was it. and you were supposed to stay alert. i guess. so what i did, i thought that's what they wanted us to do. though they didn't say. they just wanted to see the reaction they got. on that one i went down through a desk drawer, found what i thought was a pad of paper. leafed through it until i thought there was a blank page and sat there with a pencil i happened to have in my pocket doing a little poetry which was a good exercise because you had to remember what went before to make it rhyme. they finally took me out after about 4 1/2 hours but the poetry was never publish, i can guarantee you that.

heat chamber. running body temperature up. they had the heat was at 135 degrees. sound, that was an interesting one. they put you in a chamber and they could vary the sound, frequency and amplitude and they'd vary it up to all different kinds of frequencies and different strength of sound. you actually would get a harmonic on a bone they'd briefed us on this ahead of time. a harmonic on a bone length to where your bone sort of tickled when they had the sound running at that. were you getting a reaction to it, where it sort of reverberated inside your body. light pulse, another theory back then was that the 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 you had light pulses of strobe lights, they can make them brighter or dimmer, run the frequency up and down, and they

had briefed us at about ten cycles per second, seemed to be debilitating to some people. they'd run a lot of tests on this. and some people really would sort of phase out a little bit in their abilities at 10 cps. i found 10 cps sort of more irritating than the others but fortunately i didn't really phase out. another way we were introduced to there for the first time was the centrifuge. they had a 25-foot arm on a human centrifuge that would go around and they ran us up to the 8g level which was approximately what was going to be expected during launch and re-entry on project mercury. pressure chamber run. but this was done differently. pressure chamber run was done where you go up in normal pressure chamber, go up until you're up in space, in a high altitude and reduced pressure, you're breathing oxygen, of course. but then instead of letting you down very 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

out your ears as the pressure built up, of course. 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 were going straight down once you decelerated and were falling down into the thicker part of the atmosphere. you would be going super sonic straight down. with a helmet on and you couldn't get in and twitch your nose. if your nose itched you couldn't get into it. you're there doing like we all do in airliners making your chin go and making your nose go back and forth and trying to make pressure go back into your ears. that was a different one than we had ever had before. psychological tests were interesting, too. and they wanted to do those, i think there was good reason for that. it had indication from submariners and people in the antarctic on projects down there, when you're in isolation for a lengthy period of time, you may have enough sensory deprivation that you develop anxiety, depression, even psychosis.

they didn't want anyone up in the spacecraft with psychosis. they gave us all sorts of tests. the first one was just a plain iq test. it remains secret as to what our iq was, whether they picked the good guys or the bad guys. anyway, they ran an iq test on all of us, ran multiple multiple questionnaires. we had teams of psychiatrists there doing this. i don't know how many rorschach, ink blot tests we went through, but there were dozens of them. they would spring this on you, what do you think this looks like? to me they always looked like birds or butterflies, one or the other. i think i was reminded of a joke that was going around back at that time of the psychiatrist who had a patient that showed him the rorschach prints, the

ink blots and asked him what he thought of that. the patient launched into the most lurid details of pornographic activity like you wouldn't believe. and on and on and on. he finally got the fellow stopped. showed another picture. thing again and away they go. this went on about ten times. the psychiatrist is getting disgusted. he hadn't seen anything except pornographic things he described in great detail. he said why do you respond that way? the patient said don't blame me, doc. you're the one showing the dirty pictures. there were other ones that were interesting, too. go home tonight and take out a piece of paper and write down the answer 20 times to who am i? you'll find that you can do a lot of things. at that time i could say i'm a husband. i'm a father. i'm a marine. i'm a pilot. i'm a so and so and you get up

to 15 or 16 and it's hard to get those last four or five. exactly what they were trying to do with that one, i never knew either. any way. we went through all of these interviews and pictures of where you would describe pictures of where they would say draw a picture of your choosing on this piece of paper that would illustrate truth or honesty. that's getting in the abstract. karen, a clinical psychologist, may make something out of this, those were things that we didn't know how to analyze at that time so you just went along and did the best job you could. pete conrad, he was a great guy, one of the finest astronauts we ever had, he just had an attitude and sense of humor that was great. this actually happened with pete. he was in with one of the psychiatrists one day and the psychiatrist put out a plain piece of white paper. slid it to pete. what do you see? and pete looked at it and said the first thing i see is you got it upside down.

[ laughter ] that could have had something to do with pete not being selected in the first group. 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 of 1959 announced the seven. spacecraft was still being defined and 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. 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 still had nuclear weapons weighing in thousands of pounds so they had to develop a larger booster. when the space program came

around to where we're going to send manned spacecraft up, they had an advantage. they could practically put their house up if they wanted to where we could get up just over 4,000 pounds and that was max. to do the "mercury" spacecraft that you see in the hall outside, we were trying to save every pound that we possibly could. it was only a one-person spacecraft. a light structure. they even went with 100% oxygen environment because you could -- that gave you the same oxygen absorption at 27,000 feet at only 5 psi instead of 14.72 like sea level here right now. you went with a lower pressure but with 100% oxygen which let you have the same oxygen intake that we have right here on earth. that way you could build a lighter spacecraft and didn't have to have structure as high because it was only 5 psi

instead of higher pressure you want in the vacuum of space. the original spacecraft had no window except for a little portal on the left where you could tell whether it was light or dark out of that. early on the powers that be and people at nasa said we should put a window in even though it added a few pounds to the spacecraft. so they did. it came over the astronaut's head, and it did add some weight. used to call it a capsule. i referred to that already a couple times here. we later came around to describing it as a spacecraft but we're still calling it a capsule. after my flight bob hope said it was the first time in history that a capsule had taken a man. another thing people were surprised about is nasa had a rule that prohibited any camera from being onboard.

it could be automatic but they were afraid if you had a hand held camera that it might distract you enough that you wouldn't pay attention to what you were supposed to be paying attention to. i thought that was ridiculous. if we're going to be that badly bent out of shape psychologically we probably shouldn't go up there to begin with. he finally agreed that we ought to take a camera. we were searching for a camera that could have a pistol grip on it that you could trigger the camera like this to use this motion to advance the film. we hadn't settled on a camera yet. there was one not working the way we wanted it to work. i was downtown in cocoa beach and saw in a drugstore corner a new camera with automatic exposure. it was brand new at that time, little minolta.

it looked like one we could use for a hand grip. and so i bought it for 45 bucks and took it out to -- we adapted it in the machine shop. nasa didn't have a photo shop at that time. adapted it. that was the little camera that took what i believe are the first pictures, handheld pictures ever taken of space. the ones that you've seen probably of north africa with the dust storms and atlas mountains and those pictures have been pretty well distributed. nasa has not reimbursed me to this day. sean o'keefe, where are you? i know he's here. he was here a little while ago. he was here a little while ago. we went into training then different types of training. physical training, nasa to this day starting back then leaves you on your own to stay in shape. however you want to do it. running, jogging, swimming, playing handball, whatever you want to do. be in good shape at flight time. we got into academics, so on,

systems, emergency, simulator, those are standard. you have seen those. or know of them. there were different types of they weren't sure what we were getting into in this new environment in space. they put us through training on things that didn't have to be done that aren't done now but at that time they thought it safer to do these things so -- they didn't want to leave any stone unturned if we were going to go into space. in a slowly removing room in pensacola where they do sea sick studies down there, the doctor down there was the one who is the world's greatest expert on motion sickness. he had a room where you sat in there and slowly revolved. you didn't know that from looking at it. you had no sensation until you moved yourself. when you started to throw something across the room, you had to arc it like this and it would go across the room on a curve because the room was turning. if you try to hit a softball and