Glenn's historic flight one of the most dangerous ever
John Glenn’s history-making flight into orbit on Feb. 20, 1962, was one of the most dangerous manned missions ever flown, longtime NBC correspondent Jay Barbree recalled Thursday.
“That was a really risky flight,” said Barbree, of Merritt Island, who has covered every launch of astronauts from the Space Coast. “Of course, John had the coolness and the guts and all to do it.”
In an effort to match Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight the previous year, NASA had rushed work to convert Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles to fly astronauts, Barbree, 83, said.
“They only had a couple of flights under their belts, and they’d had a couple of blow-ups,” he said. “It might explode just as well as take off.”
Glenn’s Atlas rocket had been equipped with an escape tower in case of a launch emergency, but its reliability was uncertain. Barbree, whose most recent book, "Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight," published in 2014 and featuring a forward written by Glenn. said the risk was greater than on any of the Apollo missions that followed.
That’s why fellow Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter radioed the famous line, “Godspeed John Glenn,” and T.J. O’Malley, the test conductor overseeing the launch said, “Good Lord, ride all the way.”
“They counted on down and he went,” Barbree remembered. “You talk about sitting on pins and needles.”
Given the flight’s importance and danger, Barbree remained on the air throughout the three-orbit flight lasting nearly five hours.
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Near the mission’s end, a false signal had engineers concerned that the Friendship 7 capsule’s heat shield might have come loose, endangering Glenn’s life. Some mission controllers didn’t want to tell Glenn about it, but Alan Shepard, the first American in space, insisted upon it.
Glenn later calmly radioed that he was OK: “That was a real fireball,” Barbree remembered him saying.
“It’s still probably the most dangerous manned flight we ever flew,” Barbree said. “That’s just the way it was.”
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