Fifty years ago, John Glenn was inspiration to Americans -- and to future astronauts like Jon McBride
Mark McCarter - Huntsville Times
He was a sophomore in college, piled in a car with his buddies, heading from West Virginia to Fort Lauderdale for spring break.
They cruised down U.S. 1 through Titusville, and he pondered even then the magic that was being created across the Indian River, spying the skinny towers in the distance.
Jon McBride can't remember now if they came through Titusville the week before or a week after John Glenn lifted off in Friendship 7, becoming the first American to orbit the earth in space.
Whichever it may have been, McBride was mesmerized.
It was 50 years ago Monday that Glenn made his historic flight.
And that college kid "just enthralled" by space flight, who just missed Glenn's launch by a week?
He'd later become the first man to give Glenn a tour of a space shuttle.
McBride was one of the original 35 astronauts selected by NASA for its shuttle program. He was the commander for STS-41G, piloting Challenger for a 197-hour journey.
On Monday, the 68-year-old McBride was at Kennedy Space Center, greeting visitors, posing for pictures, signing autographs and answering questions -- "How does the shuttle work?" asked one boy -- as part of the Astronaut Encounter program.
It was a fairly normal day, really, probably less than normal at Kennedy Space Center, considering the holiday.
Glenn and Scott Carpenter, the only other surviving member of the Mercury 7, had spent the weekend at the Cape, visiting Pad 14 from where they were launched, enjoying a reunion with many of the Project Mercury team, then being lauded at a public ceremony as heroes.
They were heroes for McBride, as well.
"Al Shepard and John Glenn and Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, they all inspired me," said McBride, who built his own rockets with school friends.
For a generation, the seven Mercury astronauts -- gifted with what writer Tom Wolfe would call "The Right Stuff" in the best-selling book by that name -- were bigger than life, yet they were real-life icons.
The fame -- "an occupational hazard" for the Mercury guys, as Carpenter put it -- eluded many of the other 300-plus Americans who have gone into space. They have been no less intelligent, brave and skillful. (McBride was first a Navy pilot with 600 missions from an aircraft carrier; "My landings matched my takeoffs, which is a good thing.")
As time evolved, we grew jaded as a nation by space flight, disappointed perhaps we no longer had the steely determination of President Kennedy, Dr. Wernher von Braun and others in the 1960s who were obsessed with putting a man on the moon.
While at the Cape over the weekend, Glenn expressed his disappointment with NASA's current status.
"It's unseemly to me that here we are, supposedly the world's greatest space-faring nation, and we don't even have a way to get back and forth to our own International Space Station," he said.
President George W. Bush's decision to cancel the shuttle program was "a big mistake," he said.
McBride echoed the frustration, saying, "I hope they wake up and plug the socket in again."
He noted that it has become an economic matter, that "everybody is talking about what it costs.
"What nobody is talking about ... nobody mentions the return. They talk about what it will cost in the investment. I maintain," McBride said, "it will cost us more not to invest in space."
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