John Glenn Frustrated on 50th Anniversary of Friendship 7

John Glenn Frustrated on 50th Anniversary of Friendship 7 - For John Glenn, who 50 years ago became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth in his Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft, today is a bittersweet anniversary.

Twelve astronauts have since walked on the moon. Robot space probes have visited every planet from Mercury to Neptune, and another is on its way to Pluto. And there has been at least one American living in space at any given time for the past dozen years; six men -- two Americans, three Russians and a Dutchman -- are today orbiting on the International Space Station.

John Glenn Frustrated on 50th Anniversary of Friendship 7 (ABC News)

But the United States, having retired its aging fleet of space shuttles last year, has no way at the moment to launch its own astronauts. NASA has plans for a new Space Launch System (SLS for short), and hopes private industry will take on the job of ferrying astronauts to the space station. But, for now, when the United States needs to launch an astronaut, it rents a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

"It's unseemly to me that here we are, supposedly the world's greatest space-faring nation, and we don't even have a way to get back and forth to our own International Space Station," Glenn said during the celebrations marking the anniversary of Friendship 7.

The world was a very different place when Glenn made his five-hour flight. The Cold War was at its most chilling. The United States had been embarrassed by the first Soviet satellite and the first Soviet cosmonaut. President John F. Kennedy asked his aides if there was something -- anything -- America could do to beat the Russians in space. NASA tried, but the Atlantic floor off Cape Canaveral was littered with the wreckage of failed rockets.

America did not just need better boosters, it needed bigger heroes. It found seven: the original Mercury astronauts. And the one with whom it most fell in love was Glenn.

Fifty years ago, on Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn squeezed into his Friendship 7 capsule, circled the earth three times in five hours and became a national hero.

"Zero-G and I feel fine," he said from his spacecraft. "Man, that view is tremendous."

Historians' descriptions of the time describe a mood that seems almost alien now: a nation of people fearful of Soviet attack (the Cuban missile crisis would happen eight months later), glued to their black-and-white TV sets, watching a man in a silver spacesuit climb into a tiny capsule and disappear into the sky.

It was likened to single combat. The Soviets were Goliath. Glenn was David.

"We hadn't really thought that any nation could even touch us technically," Glenn said in a 1998 interview with ABC News. "And all at once, here was this bunch of Soviets over there, for heaven's sake, outdoing the United States of America in technical and scientific things."

After the flight of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in May 1961, Kennedy had committed the United States to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Glenn later said he wondered at the time how NASA would pull it off.

The Atlas rocket that would launch his Mercury capsule was famously unreliable; it had blown up on several test flights.

Glenn named his spacecraft Friendship 7, honoring his fellow astronauts. He would make three orbits of the earth. His launch was scheduled and scrubbed no fewer than 10 times in four months.

John Glenn: 50th Anniversary of First American Astronaut in Orbit

And then it was launch day -- Feb. 20, 1962. Glenn woke early, had breakfast, put on his pressure suit and climbed into Friendship 7 before dawn. The countdown moved toward zero. In the control center, Glenn's backup pilot, Scott Carpenter, keyed a microphone and said, "Godspeed, John Glenn."

Glenn did not hear him; Carpenter was not on his radio link. Instead, he felt a jolt as the rocket left the launch pad.

"Roger, liftoff, and the clock is running. We're under way."

The Atlas did not fail. Five minutes later, he was in orbit.

The nation hung on every moment of his flight, one man, alone in the void, in a capsule so small (6 feet in diameter at the base) that he could not stretch out his arms. He reported that weightlessness was pleasant. He marveled at the "fireflies" -- later determined to be flecks of frost -- that drifted away from Friendship 7 when he rapped on the hull of the spacecraft.

Glenn was having a wonderful time. But then, trouble. As he began his second orbit, Mission Control received a signal suggesting that the heat shield, designed to prevent the capsule from burning up during reentry, had come loose. Worried controllers feared they might lose Glenn. They ordered him not to jettison the capsule's retro rockets, strapped on over the heat shield, after he fired them to descend from orbit.

The outside of the capsule heated to 3,000 degrees as the atmosphere slowed it. Glenn watched as chunks of debris flew past the window and wondered whether it was the retro pack breaking up, or the heat shield.

It held. He splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean. America had probably seen nothing so daring since the transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh.

Crowds mobbed him at a ticker-tape parade in New York. Kennedy, who saw Glenn's star power, welcomed him at the White House. He returned to work at NASA and lobbied for another flight, but the Kennedy administration had quietly let his bosses know he was too much of a national icon to risk in space again.

The Americans would gradually overtake the Soviets in space. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969. But we no longer live in the space age. Glenn has complained publicly that since the space shuttles were retired last year, America has not had a way to launch its own astronauts into orbit. And Glenn's mantle as hero has only taken him so far; a run for president in 1984 left him in debt for years.

John Glenn is 90 now, dividing his time between Washington and Ohio after a long career in the U.S. Senate. He and his wife Annie have been married for 69 years, slowed only by the inevitable maladies of age.

He did, after years of lobbying, get to fly on a space shuttle mission in 1998. He was 77 by then, arguing that some effects of weightlessness -- bone and muscle loss -- are similar to the effects of aging. While he was in orbit he said he was having such a good time that he might like another flight after that, but Annie, visibly angry, put a quick stop to that.

Glenn and Scott Carpenter, the two surviving members of the original Mercury 7 group, have been celebrated this weekend at events near Cape Canaveral, in Washington, and in Glenn's native Ohio. They have repeatedly said they hope the nation's space effort is only in a lull.

"John, thank you for your heroic effort and all of you for your heroic effort," said Carpenter in Florida. "But we stand here waiting to be outdone." ( Good Morning America )

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Treasures that helped shape theory of evolution found by chance in dusty cabinet

Treasures that helped shape theory of evolution found by chance in dusty cabinet - For 160 years they lay forgotten in a dusty cabinet, lost to science because they had been hastily filed away.

Now a treasure trove of fossils collected by the young Charles Darwin has been discovered by chance.

They were collected in the 1830s in South America during his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle.

Great find: A treasure trove of fossils collected by a young Charles Darwin has been discovered by chance

Great mind: A young Charles Darwin at the time of the Beagle voyage in the 1830s

Experts say the find sheds new light on this formative period for Darwin, then in his 20s, whose study of tropical plants and wildlife set the stage for his ground-breaking theory of evolution.

The fossils, neatly pressed on to slides, some bearing Darwin’s signature, were discovered by Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London.

He was searching for some other fossils at the British Geological Survey’s cavernous storeroom in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire. Dr Falcon-Lang came upon an old cabinet, with drawers inside labelled ‘unregistered fossil plants’, and decided to take a look.

‘I can’t resist a mystery so I pulled one open,’ he said. ‘What I found inside made my jaw drop! Inside were hundreds of beautiful glass slides. Almost the first I picked up was labelled “C. Darwin Esq”.

‘This is an amazing snapshot into Darwin’s working life. This was one of the most exciting periods in the history of science, forming the mind of the man who would develop the theory of evolution, which would change the world.’

The 314 slides found by Dr Falcon-Lang include 40million-year-old plants from a remote island off the coast of Chile.

Another shows a towering tree-sized fungus which covered the Earth 400million years ago when the climate was so hot there was no ice even at the Poles.

Chance to learn more: Experts say the find sheds new light on this formative period for Darwin, then in his 20s

The slides were made by slicing and polishing the fossils into translucent sheets and then placing them between two glass plates so they could be studied under a microscope. Dr Falcon-Lang added: ‘There are 100 million-year-old fossil trees from the latter age of the dinosaurs. It’s real Jules Verne stuff, and scientists are only now starting to study it and understand its scientific importance.’

The fossils were lost because Darwin’s best friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, did not catalogue them properly. He had been given the job while working at the British Geological Survey in 1846.

But before he was able to put them in the official specimen register, he was offered the chance to go on a voyage to the Himalayas so simply stored them in the cabinet.

Kept well: The fossils are neatly pressed onto slides and some of them bear Darwin's signature

It was moved to the group’s first headquarters in Charing Cross in London in 1851. The cabinet moved to the Geological Museum in South Kensington in 1935 and half a century later to Nottinghamshire – but it was never opened.

Dr John Ludden, of the Geological Survey, said: ‘This is quite a remarkable discovery. It makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.’ The discoveries can be viewed on the British Geological Survey website from today.

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Stephen Hawking to turn 70, defying disease

Stephen Hawking to turn 70, defying disease — British scientist Stephen Hawking has decoded some of the most puzzling mysteries of the universe but he has left one mystery unsolved: How he has managed to survive so long with such a crippling disease.

The physicist and cosmologist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease when he was a 21-year-old student at Cambridge University. Most people die within a few years of the diagnosis, called motor neurone disease in the U.K. On Sunday, Hawking will turn 70.

"I don't know of anyone who's survived this long," said Ammar Al-Chalabi, director of the Motor Neurone Disease Care and Research Centre at King's College London. He does not treat Hawking and described his longevity as "extraordinary."

"It is unusual for (motor neurone disease) patients to survive for decades, but not unheard of," said Dr. Rup Tandan, a neurology professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Still, Tandan said many longtime survivors had ventilators to breathe for them — which Hawking does not.

Hawking first gained attention with his 1988 book "A Brief History of Time," a simplified overview of the universe. It sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. His subsequent theories have revolutionized modern understanding of concepts like black holes and the Big Bang theory of how the universe began.

FILE In this June 19, 2006 file photo Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking speaks at an international gathering of scientists on the origins of the universe at Beijing's Great Hall of the People in China. British scientist Stephen Hawking has decoded some of the most puzzling mysteries of the universe but he has left one mystery for others to explain: How he managed to survive so long with such a crippling disease. The physicist and cosmologist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, or motor neuron disease, when he was a 21-year-old student at Cambridge University. Most people die within a few years of the disease being identified. On Sunday, Hawking will turn 70.(AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel-File)

To mark his birthday Sunday, Cambridge University is holding a public symposium on "The State of the Universe," featuring talks from 27 leading scientists, including Hawking himself. For 30 years, he held a mathematics post at the university previously held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking retired from that position in 2009 and is now director of research at the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.

Hawking achieved all that despite being nearly entirely paralyzed and in a wheelchair since 1970. He now communicates only by twitching his right cheek. Since catching pneumonia in 1985, Hawking has needed around-the-clock care and relies on a computer and voice synthesizer to speak.

A tiny infrared sensor sits on his glasses, hooked up to a computer. The sensor detects Hawking's cheek pulses, which select words displayed on a computer screen. The chosen words are then spoken by the voice synthesizer. It can take up to 10 minutes for Hawking to formulate a single sentence.

"The only trouble is (the voice synthesizer) gives me an American accent," the Briton wrote on his website.

It took Hawking four years to write his last book, "The Grand Design," missing his publisher's original deadline.

Hawking declined requests from The Associated Press for an interview, but his personal assistant, Judith Croasdell, spoke to the AP. She described her boss as remarkably patient.

"The way he communicates can seem frustratingly slow to most people but he doesn't let that impede his thinking," she said.

After a brief hospital stay, Hawking told her that he spent the time thinking about black holes.

Hawking typically comes into the office after a big breakfast and reading the news, Croasdell said. "He's not an early morning person, but he does stay quite late," until about 7 or 8 in the evening, she said.

Hawking's rooftop university office is crammed full of memorabilia: family photos, a miniature NASA shuttle, and a signed picture of himself with President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. On top of physics books sits a disability access guide for the university.

Hawking's fame has led to guest appearances on some of his favorite television shows including "The Simpsons" and "Star Trek." His animated likeness from "The Simpsons" has even been turned into an action figure — one of which sits proudly on his office desk. There's also a Homer Simpson clock that Hawking is known to glare at when visitors are late for an appointment.

"He's a big ham, he loves the spotlight," said Kitty Ferguson, who's written two biographies of the physicist.

She said he has a wry sense of humor and has programmed his computer to respond to random encounters with people who ask if he's Stephen Hawking. "No, but I'm often mistaken for that man," his voice synthesizer deadpans.

Lou Gehrig's disease, also called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, attacks motor neurons, cells that control the muscles. Patients typically suffer muscle weakness and wasting, become paralyzed and have problems talking, swallowing and breathing. Only about 10 percent of patients live longer than a decade.

People who are stricken at a young age, as Hawking was, generally have a better chance of surviving longer. Most people are diagnosed between 50 and 70. Life expectancy generally ranges from two to five years after symptoms like slurred speech, difficulty swallowing and muscle weakness set in. Hawking's personal physicians don't discuss his condition with the press, Croasdell said.

For some reason, the disease has progressed more slowly in Hawking than in most. Al-Chalabi and colleagues are analyzing a DNA sample from Hawking, along with those of other patients, to see if there is something rare about his disease or any genetic mutations that could explain his long survival and if that information could be used to help others.

Some experts said the type of care Hawking has, including about a dozen health workers 24 hours a day, may have extended his life expectancy.

"The disease can sometimes stabilize and then the kind of care delivered may be a factor in survival," said Virginia Lee, a brain disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "Remaining mentally alert is also extremely important and he has clearly done that."

Hawking says he tries not to think about his limitations.

"I have had (Lou Gehrig's disease) for practically all my adult life," he says on his website. "Yet it has not prevented me from having a very attractive family and being successful in my work," he writes. "I try to lead as normal a life as possible and not think about my condition or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many."

From the office pictures documenting his achievements, that certainly seems to be the case. Framed photos show the physicist with several popes and on memorable trips to China and Easter Island.

He has even flown in a space simulator. In 2007, Hawking took a zero-gravity flight in Florida, the first time in 40 years he abandoned his wheelchair.

"That was the happiest I've ever seen Stephen," said Sam Blackburn, Hawking's graduate assistant, who accompanied him on the ride along with about a half-dozen others, including two doctors. "He just had the biggest grin on his face."

Hawking has also been married twice and has three children and three grandchildren. With his daughter Lucy, he has written several children's books on physics.

Al-Chalabi said most patients with Lou Gehrig's disease succumb after their breathing muscles stop working. He had no predictions for what the biggest health risks to Hawking's future might be.

"He is truly remarkable," Al-Chalabi said. "This is someone who's managed to find ways around every single problem the disease has thrown at him." ( Associated Press. )

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