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chapter three Into the Other World Anticipations of Spaceflight as Religious Experience W hat would you like to say first?” It was late in the afternoon of 20 February 1962 when John Glenn found himself a quiet spot on the deck of the USS Noa, a navy destroyer. Holding a tape recorder in his hand, he started to answer a NASA questionnaire. An hour or so before, the crew of the Noa had hoisted Glenn’s capsule, Friendship 7, out of the Atlantic Ocean, following its splashdown about 170 miles east of Grand Turk Island. Friendship 7, in America’s first manned orbital spaceflight, had just carried Glenn around the world three times. Now, to the west of the Noa, the sun was beginning to set. Glenn had always savored sunsets—“God’s masterpieces,” he called them. Before his mission, the prospect of experiencing a new sunset with each of his orbits had stirred his imagination, and the spectacle did not disappoint. The sun—“as white as a brilliant arc light”—had shone through the prism of Earth’s atmosphere to produce a spectrum of colors more vivid and varied than that normally witnessed on the ground: “greens, blues, indigos, and violets” as well as “reds, oranges and yellows.” Then it had melted swiftly away “into a long thin line of rainbow-brilliant radiance along the curve of the horizon.” And so, the mission over, what did John Glenn want to say first? “What can you say about a day in which you get to see four sunsets?”1 Glenn, then, only had the briefest of opportunities to reflect on what he had experienced aboard Friendship 7 before his thoughts were wrested from him and inserted into the official record. NASA wanted its information as fresh as it could get it. Hence the questionnaire, and hence also Glenn’s transfer that same evening via helicopter to an aircraft carrier and onward by 72 To Touch the Face of God plane to Grand Turk Island for two days of debriefing. Waiting impatiently behind the NASA technocrats stood the rest of America. Glenn had already enjoyed a measure of national celebrity before he joined the space program, having broken the record time for a cross-country flight in July 1957.2 He was the most articulate of the original Mercury Seven and the one who was most attuned to the moral and cultural content of the public expectations that surrounded the astronauts. He was also the one who seemed most naturally able to reconcile the technical and existential demands of space-age pioneering with small-town American values, inherited from an upbringing that, as Glenn himself observed, could have provided the model for Norman Rockwell ’s entire oeuvre.3 In addition, the launch of Friendship 7 had been postponed many times over a period of two months, allowing anticipation of the mission to build and channeling the nation’s attention toward its calm, resilient pilot.4 And Glenn, once finally launched in his capsule, would confront a conspicuous hazard not encountered in the suborbital missions that preceded his own: a fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. During the flight itself, telemetry data indicating that the heat shield designed to protect him had come loose—data shared with the millions following the mission live on television—made that passage back to Earth seem even more fateful.5 But Glenn survived, and as he talked to the debriefers on Grand Turk, national leaders worked to shape welcome ceremonials fit for the homecoming of this most modern of American heroes. His debriefing duties completed, Glenn returned to Florida. The drive from Patrick Air Force Base to Cape Canaveral became a twenty-mile-long parade through cheering crowds; at the Cape, he was greeted by President Kennedy, and together they went on a tour of the NASA launch facilities. After the weekend, Glenn traveled with Kennedy aboard Air Force One back to Washington, where he addressed a joint session of Congress. Two days later, he testified before the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. The next morning, New Yorkers tossed thirty-five hundred tons of confetti and ticker tape onto Glenn’s motorcade as it drove down Broadway.6 Some of the celebrations turned distinctly reverential. The New York Times commented that Glenn’s appearance before the Senate committee “took on the aura of a revival meeting in a tent in Oklahoma.”7 The success of Friendship 7, the senators confidently asserted, had effected...

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