[buccaneer81]

I always thought the coldest astronaut was John Glenn, and that his 1964 bathtub injury thankfully kept him from a Moon mission.

[Brad from Tennessee]

The world was even smaller in 1961 than today. When I watched Shepard's launch from the grounds of Cherokee Junior High, Shepard's nephew, Chris, a schoolmate who was a year older than me, was standing about 20 feet away.

Years later when I lived in Cape Canaveral (the town) I became friends with a retired NASA engineer who worked in all the manned space programs through Apollo. He told me the battle between astronauts and engineers over pilot control of the vehicle versus ground control, as depicted in the movie “The Right Stuff” was real. He said on one of the Apollo missions the astronauts failed to switch off the thrusters after reentry. When the parachute deployed and opened the thrusters continued to fire automatically to adjust the attitude of the capsule which was swinging like a pendulum. By the time the crew discovered the problem and switched the thrusters off they had burned through some of the parachute shroud lines. Also the capsule had descended to an altitude where vents had opened allowing fresh air into the capsule. This drew hydrazine, the thruster propellant which is highly poisonous, into the capsule where it was likely inhaled by the crew. He said he heard at the time that these guys would have to be medically monitored for life.

[Calvin Locke]

I read that it was JFK that put the kibosh on Glen because he was a
"national hero".

In any case, Glen should have been brought up on treason charges
for helping to prevent a Senate committee from looking into
foreign campaign donations to Clinton and the DNC.

How do you think he got his shuttle ride? There were better
qualified people to run the "age" experiments than him. Clinton
paid him off with a return to space.

My original beef with him is that he should have been booted out of
Congress, along with McCain, for participating in the thrift
fraud back in the early 1980s.