It's been 25 years since NASA astronaut John Glenn's geriatric jaunt around Earth This week marks 25 years since NASA astronaut John Glenn returned to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and became the oldest person to orbit the Earth. Glenn was flown on STS-95, nearly 37 years after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth during his 1962 Friendship 7 mission. Following his first mission, Glenn …
"The current NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, was flown on Columbia as part of the STS-61C crew in 1986. Nelson's mission was the last before the Challenger accident."
Nelson lobbying his way onto Columbia is one of the causes of the Challenger disaster. They had to bump a science specialist from Columbia to Challenger to make room for him which then caused a delay to the research which they had said would be done by a certain date, this caused NASA to come under pressure to 'catch up' and accelerate the shuttle launch schedule so they could get everything back on track.
Nelson lobbying his way onto Columbia is one of the causes of the Challenger disaster
I think that's stretching it just a little bit. The underlying cause of the Challenger disaster was NASA's increasingly laissez-faire attitude to the risks associated with spaceflight which resulted in STS-51-L launching despite suspect O-ring seals on the SRBs (as evidenced from films of previous shuttle launches that appeared to show leaks followed up by damage assessments of the seals after the SRBs had been recovered) and in weather conditions that NASA had been informed (by Morton Thiokol engineers) was well outside of the operational specifications for the o-rings and hence might compromise the seals even more.
I personally find it more believable that PowerPoint is responsible: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard. I realize the example is Columbia, but I'm pretty sure that the lesson is the same.
Despite the thoroughly analyzed and now well-understood problems with the Shuttle system, Glenn's first flight was even riskier. Literally atop a rocket designed to serve as an ICBM. A recycled design that was never intended to be 100% perfect because its mission did not require it.
With the huevos to sit atop that rocket and make a solo trip to space, I think Glenn deserved the victory lap - regardless of the political wrangling it took to get there.
Not only a rocket designed to serve as an ICBM but, as one astronaut purportedly quipped, "My life depended on 150,000 pieces of equipment – each bought from the lowest bidder[1]."
In my opinion, Glen deserved another ride and I'm glad he got one, stunt or no.
As a side note, my partner's father was an electrical engineer in the "space race" era and in one of his jobs he designed a component, albeit a minor one -- a thermistor, if memory serves, for the Apollo command module.
She claims that her dad bit his fingernails to the quick every time, from launch to splashdown, worried that, beyond the best of his abilities, he'd made some mistake that would jeapordize the mission and the crew.
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[1] It may have been Alan Shepard or Glenn himself but there appears to be no definitive source for the quote.
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