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Ohio Senator John Glenn, who is slated to become the oldest person in space on the space shuttle launch scheduled for October 29, will be Case Western Reserve University's commencement speaker this spring.
He will deliver the address during the Commencement Convocation at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, May 16 in the Veale Center.
Glenn is part of the seven-person international crew for the space shuttle Discovery, which is slated to begin a nine-day mission with a 2 p.m. launch Thursday, October 29 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
At 77, Glenn will be 16 years older than anyone who has been in space before. He will serve as a payload specialist on the space flight, participating in numerous tests to help researchers try to understand how periods of weightlessness lead astronauts to experience many symptoms similar to those of aging. These include a loss of bone density and muscle mass, problems with the sense of balance, erratic sleep cycles, and changes in the circulatory system which enlarge and weaken the heart.
"Scientists are interested in studying these effects on astronauts in the hope that we will learn how to better treat such frailties of old age, as well as benefit younger astronauts and people," Glenn says in a statement on his Senate Web page (http://www.senate.gov/%7Eglenn/main.html).
"We have some thirty-four-million Americans over the age of 65 right now, and that's due to triple over the next fifty years," he adds in a NASA interview (http://shuttle.nasa.gov/sts-95/crew/intglenn.html). "By the year 2050, we're supposed to have right at a hundred-million people over 65, the fastest-growing segment in our population are those 85 and up, and this same trend is going on all over the world."
This will be Glenn's second space flight. His first was February 20, 1962, during a five-hour flight in the one-man Mercury-Atlas 6 "Friendship 7" spacecraft -- the nation's first mission in which a manned spacecraft orbited the Earth.
As a test pilot, Glenn set another major record -- in July 1957, he notched the first transcontinental flight at supersonic speed, flying from Los Angeles to New York in just under three and a half hours.
Glenn was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974. He also set records in his political career, becoming the first Ohio senator elected to four consecutive terms when he was re-elected in 1992).
He had attended Muskingum College from 1939-42 before leaving to enter the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, from which he graduated in 1943 and was commission in the Marine Corps.
Glenn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 1965 after a distinguished and decorated military career. He served as vice president and director of the Royal Crown Cola Co. from 1966-74.
He completed his B.Sc. in 1962. He has received honorary degrees from Muskingum and eight other colleges and universities.
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