[Launch Alert] Fifty Years Ago Today

[Launch Alert]

                             LAUNCH ALERT
 				  
                              Brian Webb
                     Ventura County, California
                  launch-alert-editor at earthlink.net
                        www.spacearchive.info

                               2012 February 20 (Monday) 14:54 PST
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                            LOOKING BACK:
              John Glenn and the Flight of Friendship 7
                            by Brian Webb

It was fifty years ago today that astronaut John Glenn became the
first American to orbit the Earth. Although that was so long ago, and
I was very young, I do have a few memories of that historic flight.

My first memory of the flight is actually of one of the several
unsuccessful launch attempts. It was early on a Sunday or Saturday
morning. The sun was already up and I was in the living room of our
home in Lawndale, Calif.

I remember sitting with my parents and watching the TV in our Curtis
Mathis entertainment center and seeing an elevator carrying Glenn
descend from the top of the launch pad following a cancelled launch
attempt. My recollection is rather murky, but I believe that I was
somewhat disappointed because I had expected to see something
important.

Sometime shortly after this scrub (within a few weeks), we moved to a
new home in Redondo Beach.

The night before the flight, my father and I watched TV. One of the
programs was some type of science fiction story involving U.S.
astronauts of the future floating outside of a spacecraft shaped like
a rifle bullet with fins. That evening We also watched Combat or
perhaps an episode McHale's Navy. I'm not sure if I was aware that
another launch attempt was scheduled for the next day.

My memory of February 20, 1962 begins in the kitchen. Dawn was
breaking and it was still somewhat dark. I had just filled my bowl
with corn flakes and topping it with a huge amount of sugar.

Soon after I started eating, my mother told me to go into the living
room and watch the TV. I went into the living room, sat in front of
the screen, and resumed eating my cereal while I watched John Glenn
liftoff aboard Friendship 7. I watched the TV for a few minutes and
then did something else. At the time, I don't think that I was very
interested in the flight.

I have no recollection of watching any further coverage of the flight.
As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure if I went to school that day.
It was common practice back then for the teachers to wheel a
television set into the classroom or cafeteria and have the students
watch the early space missions. If I had gone to school that day, I'm
fairly sure I would have watched more of the flight and would have
remembered it. Later that afternoon, I saw students from my school
walking home. Some had crayon drawings of John Glenn's spacecraft.

The following Sunday afternoon, CBS devoted that week's episode of its
program "The Twentieth Century" to Glenn's flight. Rather than watch
it, I opted to play outside in the street.

Some seven years later, I found an article about Glenn's flight in a
National Geographic article from 1962. I began to realize the
importance of what happened that day and John Glenn became one of my
heroes. He is still one of my heroes to this day.

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