Why are so many astronauts from Ohio?

[Garrison Hilliard]

Why are so many astronauts from Ohio?
Carol Motsinger , cmots...@enquirer.com 8:53 a.m. EST December 16,
2016


They were somewhere between Cambridge and New Concord, following the
country road that cuts through Ohio's meadows of blooming wildflowers
and grazing cows, when their eyes turned to the sky.

His father stopped the car. They both leaned on the machine for a
moment, mesmerized by the biplane teasing the clouds overhead. Only
one question could break the spell.

"You want to go up, Bud?" his father said. Eight-year-old John
Herschel Glenn Jr., said "yes."

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Then, it was just one small word from one small boy in one small town
in Ohio. One second during one day of a lifetime that lasted more than
34,600 days.

But that word, "yes," took Glenn and his father to the backseat of
that cockpit, down a bumpy strip and into the wild blue above the land
he always called home.

It took him to his first flight. His first adventure. His first of
many firsts.

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But Glenn's groundbreaking hours in the sky were just the first of
more than 22,000 hours – and counting – logged in space by someone
from our state. The first of 78 successful missions, too.

One of the original seven, the Cambridge native is also just one name
now on the list of 25 astronauts hailing from the Buckeye State. Ohio
boasts a "statistically significant" number of astronauts, said Bill
Barry, NASA chief historian, whose achievements add up to "a huge
legacy for NASA."

Glenn, who died in Columbus Dec. 8, will always be one of our
brightest stars. Depending on who you ask, his stature may only be
eclipsed by another certain astronaut born nine years later and less
than 200 miles away from Glenn's birthplace.

Almost 33 years after he circled his hometown in a WACO plane on that
summer day, Glenn's first 4 hours and 56 minutes in space made him the
first American astronaut to orbit Earth. And 36 years after that, the
213 hours and 44 minutes Glenn spent on the shuttle Discovery made
him, at 77, the oldest person to fly in space.

Our down-to-Earth explorer's otherworldly feats are just a segment of
his lifelong service to the world he never really left behind. Just
one of many reasons why the war hero, astronaut and popular U.S.
senator will lie in state in the Ohio Statehouse rotunda Friday. Why
his memorial service Saturday has to be held at Ohio State University,
one of the largest in the country.

The elite Ohio fraternity Glenn founded, however, can claim more
superlatives than what's bold in his biography. There's Neil
Armstrong, the boy from Wapakoneta who became the first man who
stepped on the moon, of course.

There's also Mansfield's Michael L. Gernhardt, who performed the first
U.S. space walk from the International Space Station in 2001.

Sunita Williams also belongs to Ohio. The Euclid native already holds
the record for total cumulative spacewalk time by a female astronaut.
And she's set to be one of the first astronauts to lead the upcoming
U.S. commercial spaceflights, ensuring that Ohio's banner will be
carried into the next era of space travel.

But how was Ohio there from the very beginning, from the moment of our
country's space program launch? What is it about this place that made
a boy nicknamed Bud the legend we now call Sen. John Glenn?

And why was it, when the inventors of human flight looked toward the
heavens, they saw the Ohio sky?

More than can fit on a license plate

Glenn already helped answer one of these questions.

Actually, it's inside one of the very first answers he gave the
afternoon of April 9, 1959. The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration held a press conference that day in Washington, D.C.,
to introduce the Mercury 7, the almost one-year-old program's starting
lineup in the intensifying Space Race against the Soviet Union.

A reporter asked what motivated each of these volunteers, all men with
military backgrounds and most of whom hailed from small towns. A
certain Lt. Col. Glenn, as the 37-year-old Marine was called then,
included.

Born in Cambridge, Glenn grew up in nearby New Concord, home to just
2,126 others when he spoke into that microphone.

And when he answered what motivated him, he traveled back there. He
compared his experience to that of two Ohio-based brothers who once
stood at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, "pitching a coin to see who was
going to shove the other one off the hill down there."

"I think we stand on the verge of something as big and as expansive as
that was 50 years ago," he added.

Glenn wasn't the first or the last kid from Ohio who idolized Wilbur
and Orville Wright, the inventors of the first successful airplane. He
wasn't the first or last who held a tiny version of their innovation
out a window of a cruising car and dreamed about being born with the
last name Wright.

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John Glenn's time in Cincinnati
Fullscreen
JULY 9, 1967: The modern equivalent to yesteryear's
Buy Photo
JULY 9, 1967: The modern equivalent to yesteryear's frontier scout -
astronaut Col. John Glenn - stopped by Camp Craig, near Milford,
recently to watch Boy Scouts practicing the time-honored techniques of
conquering the wilds. Enquirer file
Fullscreen
JULY 9, 1967: The modern equivalent to yesteryear's1 of 7
April 19, 1969: John Glenn in Cincinnati, Ohio. Glenn
Aug. 15, 1984: From Enquirer Reporter Bob Weston:
Former Enquirer reporter Howard Wilkinson, right, talks
Oct. 23, 1974: John Glenn meets a young fan at his
SEPTEMBER 11, 1971: Glenn Lauds Council Candidate...Helen,
APRIL 21, 1992: U.S. Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, meets
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7 Photos
John Glenn's time in Cincinnati
The brothers are on all of our cars today, by way of those "Birthplace
of Aviation" plates. It's still a statewide brand and bragging right.

Even though Wilbur was actually born in Millville, Indiana, four years
before Orville was born in Dayton.

But that Indiana footnote doesn't change the story for Tom Crouch,
senior curator of the Aeronautics Department for the Smithsonian's
National Air and Space Museum.

"If the Wrights had been born in Kitty Hawk, they never would have
invented the airplane," Crouch said, who happens to also be from Ohio.
Dayton, of course.

The architects of aviation, he said, had to hail from a city. Not some
isolated coastal community like Kitty Hawk. A place with a hardware
store around the corner, a machine shop down the block. A place still
occupied by the Industrial Revolution.

A place just like Dayton at the turn of the 20th century. "Technology
was in the air that people breathed," he said.

It was the atmosphere that hovered over much of Ohio, actually.

Almost 70 years before Orville Wright piloted a 12-second flight on
the North Carolina coast, an experimenter named A. Masson displayed
his flying machine, something he dubbed an aerial steamboat, on Race
Street in Cincinnati. There's no evidence the mysterious aircraft ever
left the surface of the Earth, according to Crouch's research.

But Masson's attempt is still important evidence: It demonstrates that
human flight was viewed as a mechanical problem that required a
mechanical solution. So it had to be an engineer, a technician, who
would be the first to meet the sky, Crouch noted.

Following suborbital flights by Shepard and Virgil
Following suborbital flights by Shepard and Virgil (Gus) Grissom, John
Glenn, a 40-year-old Marine pilot, became the first American to orbit
the Earth. During his five-hour, three-orbit flight on Feb. 20, 1962,
Glenn flew his Friendship 7 capsule by hand when a control jet
clogged. Then the nation held its breath when a faulty switch
indicated the heat shield might come off during re-entry. But Glenn
landed safely. (Photo: NASA)
Someone who worked at places like The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company
near Akron or the GE Aviation in Evendale. Someone like Wilbur and
Orville Wright, whose first company was a printing press that
published two newspapers.

Chris Burton, executive director of the Armstrong Air and Space Museum
in Wapakoneta, traces ancestry of our astronauts back even further,
beyond Glenn, beyond the Wrights.

"It's not just about pilots and aviation," he said. "It's about
scientific endeavors." Imagination and education powers ingenuity. And
Ohio's got plenty of both.

We claim one of the most prolific minds of the modern age, Thomas
Edison. One of the oldest universities in the United States, too.
That's Ohio University, founded in 1804, just a year after the western
territory became the state.

In Ohio, "if you were creative or figured out a better way to do
something, you would be rewarded for it," Burton said.

Building on a strong foundation

This structure of the mind built the self-sustaining infrastructure of
industry here, from the universities and other government assets, to
the private companies and entertainment outlets.

In 1938, that also meant the Cleveland National Air Show. And
17-year-old Glenn was there, with his father. The two of them, again,
stared at the sky, entranced by the stunt pilots racing at speeds more
than 280 miles per hour, banking dramatically, dangerously, around the
course's high pylons.

"I loved the roar of those engines and sheer speed of the planes ...
flying beckoned me as never before," Glenn wrote in "John Glenn: A
Memoir," published in 1999.

But these demonstrations were more than adrenaline-fueled fun. These
early aviators pushed the limits of human flight, said David DeFelice.
Their vital research and development just so happened to be paid for
by the price of admission.

DeFelice should know. He now works in the office of communication and
external relations at the NASA Glenn Research Center, just outside of
Cleveland. The parking lot there was once the air show field. You can
still see its outlines from the sky, he said.


The center, founded in 1942, continues that community's tradition of
cutting-edge research, continues to live in the future. Except instead
of challenging the limits of physics to win a trophy, scientists there
now strive to create technologies that are more economically and
environmentally friendly, DeFelice said.

Originally called the NACA Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, the
organization notably developed the Centaur, a high-energy rocket that
burned both liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. It propelled major NASA
milestones. We wouldn't have made it to the moon without it, for one.

And it may activate future discoveries: The Centaur is still in use.

Some 200 miles south of the research center, the Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base exists in a similarly exceptional timeline, one that
extends from a prestigious past to the dreams of today.

Huffman Prairie is there, the flat grassy field where the Wright
brothers tested plane design and trained hundreds of pilots.

Overall view of Astronaut John Glenn as he enters into
Overall view of Astronaut John Glenn as he enters into the spacecraft
"Friendship 7" prior to MA-6 launch operations at Launch Complex 14.
The story is that Glenn asked his children for suggestions on what to
name his ship. He added "7," in honor of his Mercury Project
astronauts. (Photo: NASA)
The base outside of Fairborn also houses the Air Force Research
Laboratory. In early 1959, lab tests there were part of the process
that pared down 508 astronaut candidates to 110. Then 32. Then 18. And
finally, seven.

The research there also shaped the overall program, said Doug Lantry,
curator at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton. The work
explored the man in manned space travel. The tests were designed to
not only make sure the human fit the machine, but the machine fit the
human.

At Wright-Patterson, scientists violently shook Glenn and his six
cohorts, all strapped down in seats and asked to read written
instructions.

They dropped the seven guinea pigs from high elevations. Heated them
up and cooled them down. Blasted them with noise. And then listened to
their hearts.

These extremes conditions were all part of the effort to replicate
what scientists guessed would be the physical experience of traveling,
weightless in a cramped capsule, at 17,000 mph around the Earth.

To keep them safe out there and to bring them back home.

For Glenn, that meant here.

The matters of the mind

The examinations had other results not measured in the records.

The program also aimed to enhance their mental well-being, to enhance
their confidence in the mechanics and the math. They all shook hands
with the scientists who launched them into space. That meant that
Glenn not only watched this new science unfolding, he got to tend it
himself, influence the specifics of the progress. He earned an
engineering degree from Muskingum College in New Concord, after all.

Glenn had developed "The Right Stuff," as Tom Wolfe called it in his
1979 book about the experimental pilots of the U.S. space program,
long before his time at the lab in 1959.

For Lantry, it's "habits of thought," noting that Ohio has a tradition
of "developing the right people with the right outlook" for this line
of work.

Feb. 19, 1986: U.S. Sen. John Glenn gestures during
Feb. 19, 1986: U.S. Sen. John Glenn gestures during a press conference
at Burk Lakefront Airport Wednesday afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio.
(Photo: AP)
That outlook, well, looks a lot like the attitude and the aptitude
associated with America's heartland.

NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry said the space program officials
didn't intentionally select the majority of the seven first-generation
astronauts from small towns in what we now call flyover country, from
Shawnee, Oklahoma, to Sparta, Wisconsin, to New Concord, Ohio. Five
hometowns that, even when added together, represented just .03 percent
of the United States' 180 million population at the time.

But a childhood back-dropped by rural America did cultivate the type
of skills that kept those fighter pilots alive in combat. Like
discipline and dexterity.

In New Concord, he was that boy named Bud who shot rabbits to feed his
family during the Depression. Later, he harvested rhubarb and washed
cars, saving each nickel and dime for that new bike. He lettered in
every sport he played in high school: tennis, basketball and football.

And character counted. On the program's personality test, officials
asked candidates if they ever feel like cursing. (No, was the likely
correct answer.) Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7 were introduced
as "family men" during that 1959 press conference.

In those first days of NASA, the astronauts were ambassadors,
flag-wrapped symbols of hope and the promise of the American ambition.

We weren't just trying to beat the Soviet Union, then setting the pace
with space records. We were trying to guarantee survival, the
proliferation of our way of life. The triumph of capitalism over
socialism. Because success in space also meant protection from the
atomic annihilation of our country. And the fear of the big bomb
gripped everyday Americans every day.

We looked around for heroes and we found the Mercury 7, "the new,
modern knights," Barry said.

They were an unprecedented pop culture phenomenon, an irresistible
hybrid of the American cowboy with the matinee idol. And freckle-faced
Glenn, with his charming humor and quiet strength, was a leading man.

Te Project Mercury Astronauts selection was announced
Te Project Mercury Astronauts selection was announced on April 9,
1959, only six months after the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration was formally established on Oct. 1, 1958, included:
front row, left to right, Walter H. Schirra, Jr., Donald K. Slayton,
John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. Back row, Alan B. Shepard, Jr., Virgil
I. "Gus" Grissom and L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. (Photo: NASA)
Glenn, and later Armstrong, "were two men who were absolute straight
arrows, as honest as the day is long," the Smithsonian's Crouch said.
These two Ohioans represented American virtues that Americans have
always had, to "an extraordinary degree," he said.

Glenn belongs to this world and the one beyond it now. But his
gravity, that legendary magnetism, feels stronger at home.

Becoming an astronaut doesn't feel so far-fetched here. It's not just
a Halloween costume or a fading childhood fantasy.

It's real people, 25 real people who are like us. At least in one way.

Gregory H. Johnson was born in 1962, just months after Glenn orbited
the Earth in Friendship 7. In 1980, he graduated from high school in
Fairborn, in the shadow of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Today, he's one of the 25 NASA astronauts who list Ohio in their
official biography.

But on the night of July 20, 1969, he is a seven-year-old watching a
black-and-white TV set in his grandmother's living room. After about
11 p.m., he sprints to the backyard with his brother and sister.

They are all looking at the crescent moon. They are all looking for
Neil Armstrong.

Johnson finds something else.

I'm going to be an astronaut, he says.


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