Can John Glenn Do It Again?
Long ago he saved America from losing the space race to the Russians. Now the 77-year-old astronaut has a new mission: saving NASA.
ON A COMMERCIAL FLIGHT THE chance of having a bad day is one in a million. On the space shuttle it’s one in 262. For this reason, once and future astronaut John Glenn has squirmed into a neon-orange space suit at Houston’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, where he is about to rehearse a series of spectacular catastrophes—cabin-pressure failure, a botched takeoff, onboard fire—that would require bailing out over the Atlantic. NASA officials pray nothing of the sort happens when Glenn returns to space this month for the first time since he became the first American to orbit the earth in 1962, but they like to be prepared. Simulating an emergency over water, two fresh-faced assistants lead the 77-year-old national icon over to an enormous pool and load him onto a large yellow crane. It lifts him up, turns, and suspends him over the surface. Glenn hangs there, gently swaying back and forth like a forlorn autumn leaf. Behind the bubble of his space helmet, his familiar freckled, balding countenance wears a bemused expression, a look your father might bear if you took him to a carnival and strapped him into a seat on the Salt ’N Pepper shaker ride.
The crane lets go, and Glenn hits the water. A dozen or so technicians standing in the puddles around the pool wait in a state of total suspense as the senator disappears below the surface. After his life preserver inflates, Glenn bobs back, still wearing the same abstracted, imperturbable expression. Nothing to it.
Like a World War II veteran who returns to Normandy to see again the beaches where he took part in the most enormous struggle of his time, John Glenn finds himself back at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) after a 36-year hiatus. He had often spoke of wanting to make a second flight; as his winter years set in, the desire became overwhelming. Perhaps he just wanted to see the naked universe unspooling out the window of a spacecraft again. Perhaps (after a failed presidential bid and the Keating Five scandal) he wanted to see his name linked to an innocent, sublime adventure on the front pages of the country’s newspapers one more time.
Yes, it is easy to understand why John Glenn wants to go back into space. But why would NASA, a multibillion dollar agency with important things to do, want to send him? The official purpose of his mission is to investigate parallels between the aging process and the effects of spaceflight on the human body. But the real stakes are much higher: Like John Glenn, NASA itself longs for a return to its former glory days. At the Johnson Space Center, the hub of the nation’s manned space program (where employees have suffered from a drifting sense of purpose ever since the close of the Apollo program in 1972), a woman checking credentials recently wore a button that read “Mars or Bust!” Employees dream like fading starlets of future leading roles, above all, a manned mission to the Red Planet—a mythic heavenly object, the body in the solar system that most resembles Earth. Getting anybody there would be a monumental undertaking and would cost billions. How better to generate public support for such a quest than to remind the nation of the first time it fell head over heels for an astronaut? NASA’s roll of the dice could save manned spaceflight, the JSC, and maybe even NASA itself—or it could doom them all.
“John Glenn Is a Big Boy”
NOTHING BRINGS HOME THE FEELING OF NASA’S IRRELEVANCE like walking out of one of the JSC’s low, rectangular buildings at twilight and confronting an oversized full moon on the horizon. Such a moon looks more like a portent than a destination. Astronauts have visited, they have brought back a few hard-earned souvenirs, but the eternal unapproachability of the moon remains intact, revealing the conquests of the Apollo era for what they were: brash, meteoric, gone. As I drove past the humongous Saturn 5 rocket that lies useless on its side near the main entrance to the JSC, I had the disquieting feeling that it was a metaphor for all of NASA—frozen in place, a mirror of the past.
And why not? For years, the past offered the only consolation as the present veered from boring to horrific. After the epic grandeur of the Moon flights, the JSC was reduced to flying the shuttle around Earth, which seemed like Space Lite. Then NASA scientists ignored a contractor’s warning about launching the shuttle in cold weather, leading to the 1986 explosion of the Challenger. A $1 billion Mars probe coasted to its destination in 1993 only to lapse into a mechanical coma. Meanwhile, enormous projects like the space station and the Hubble telescope bogged down in a muck of cost overruns and delays.
The person who has made it his job to change both the reality and the perception of NASA is 58-year-old NASA administrator Dan Goldin. His tan skin, silver hair, and booming voice give him a commanding presence that makes him seem larger than his average size. Since he took over in 1992, some interesting changes have occurred at the agency, though the public has only begun to notice. By contrast with the ticker-tape parade triumphs of before, the nineties have been a time of quieter victories: obscure discoveries by unmanned space probes and an unprecedented restructuring of the agency at the hands of Goldin. A bombastic, hot-tempered, pragmatic executive, Goldin is the kind of leader you don’t see in government service anymore because he’s almost too colorful. “Ballsy” is the nice way to describe him; “son of a bitch” is the phrase used by many subordinates. Sometimes he speaks so forcefully you think he could verbally lash water into boiling. But he is not without charm, largely because he retains a boy’s enthusiasm for his work. “Age seven, my father took me to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York,” he dictates in his Bronx staccato, explaining when his infatuation with space began. “I built model planes and rockets. I read about astronomy. I followed the German rocket scientists who came here. Then Alan Shepard flew, and I decided, I’m going to go to NASA.”
In 1962 he landed a job as a research scientist at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. Five years later, he left the agency to work for an aerospace contractor. After 25 years in private industry, Goldin returned to take over NASA and immediately set about turning the place upside down. “In private industry there are clear measures of success,” he said. “Are you showing high profit margins? Does your corporation have strong sales? It is much more difficult to measure the performance of government.” But he’s trying. Goldin has developed a 25-year strategic plan and insists new projects meet the parameters of his mantra: faster, better, cheaper. These days the average probe is built in about four years, instead of the usual eight, and costs $175 million, rather than $590 million. And he has cut the NASA work force by one fourth, from 25,062 employees down to 18,400. The NASA that has emerged is more agile, more daring, and leaner. Whether it’s a stronger and smarter agency and whether, by continuing to spend most of its budget on manned flight, it is heading in the right direction, however, are subjects of intense debate. Regardless, Goldin’s salty manner and cost-cutting ways have brought him popularity on Capitol Hill.
Among the most controversial of the changes Goldin has brought to NASA is privatization. For example, the preparation for launching the shuttle that will carry John Glenn beyond the atmosphere is now managed by a private Houston company called United Space Alliance (USA), which will also provide some Mission Control officers for the flight. In one sense this is business as usual; USA is a joint venture of Rockwell (whose space division was later acquired by Boeing) and Lockheed Martin, the two behemoths that always did most of the work on the shuttle. But the implications are profound: The creation of USA is the first step in a process that could lead to space tourism. Goldin wants NASA to give up day-to-day operation of the shuttle because each flight costs about $400 million. Faced with the prospect of handing control over to a profit-driven entity, even those who accept the change are lukewarm about it. “I’m kind of neutral on the idea,” said Tommy Holloway, the director of the shuttle program, who worked his way up through Mission Control. “Privatization, in theory, motivates the company to do things that the government is unable or unwilling to do. Privatize with the right incentives, and the contractor is motivated to minimize cost and perhaps increase services.”
“To play devil’s advocate, might not a consequence be to minimize cost, but also increase risk?” I asked.
“If it’s not done very carefully, you’re absolutely correct,” said Holloway.
After changing NASA’s reality, Goldin decided to try to alter the public’s perception of the agency as well. Goldin is more than just a cost-cutter. He is a gambler—a smart, calculating gambler with a finely tuned sense of what moves the public. (To help NASA relate to the taxpayers better, Goldin recently installed a telegenic man named Alan Ladwig in an office near his own and made him senior adviser to the administrator, with duties that include acting as a kind of super-PR man. When I stopped by, I noticed from the books on his desk that Ladwig was studying mythology, to help engineers describe their projects in heroic, universal terms.) When John Glenn approached Goldin about his wish to return to space, Goldin must have appreciated that a successful mission would be a public relations bonanza. Putting the vintage hero back into space would finally rid NASA of the lingering stain of the Challenger disaster. And it would generate crucial support for the politically beleaguered space station. There’s also the possibility that Glenn’s mission would help NASA advance the cause of a future Mars project—a goal particularly dear to Goldin’s heart.
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