John Glenn Returns to Space at 77: STS-95 Launch, October 29, 1998

John Glenn returned to space on October 29, 1998, when space shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 2:19 p.m. Eastern time. Glenn, a sitting US senator from Ohio, was 77 years old, which made him the oldest person ever to fly in space. Thirty-six years earlier he had become the first American to orbit Earth.

Launch Day for STS-95

Discovery left Launch Pad 39B with seven crew members. Curtis Brown commanded the mission and Steven Lindsey served as pilot. Scott Parazynski, Stephen Robinson and Pedro Duque of the European Space Agency were mission specialists, while Chiaki Mukai of Japan’s space agency, NASDA, and Glenn flew as payload specialists. Duque became the first Spaniard in space, and the flight was Mukai’s second and last mission.

The launch drew unusual attention. President Bill Clinton watched from Florida, becoming the second sitting president to see a crewed launch in person and the only one to watch a shuttle launch. The event was also used for the public debut of high-definition television broadcasting in the United States, with Walter Cronkite and former astronaut Pete Conrad hosting the coverage.

One small problem appeared at liftoff. The door covering Discovery’s drag chute fell away when the main engines ignited. Because engineers could not rule out an early deployment, the crew did not use the chute when the orbiter landed and stopped with brakes instead.

From Friendship 7 to Discovery

Glenn’s first spaceflight took place on February 20, 1962. His Mercury capsule, Friendship 7, circled Earth three times, and he splashed down 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds after launch. NASA transferred the capsule to the Smithsonian in 1963, where it remains part of the national collection.

NASA’s count puts the gap between the two flights at 36 years, eight months and nine days. You can check that interval with the days between dates calculator, or see Glenn’s second launch in context on the 1998 calendar.

	Friendship 7	STS-95
Launch date	February 20, 1962	October 29, 1998
Vehicle	Mercury capsule on an Atlas rocket	Space shuttle Discovery
Crew size	1	7
Orbits	3	134
Duration	About 4 hours, 55 minutes	About 9 days, 20 hours

Why a 77-Year-Old Senator Flew on the Shuttle

The idea came from Glenn himself. After reading NASA medical material in 1995, he noticed that weightlessness causes several changes that look like aging on Earth: loss of bone and muscle, balance problems and disrupted sleep. An older astronaut, he argued, could help researchers compare the two.

NASA Administrator Dan Goldin set two conditions. The flight needed a genuine scientific purpose, and Glenn had to pass the same physical examination as younger astronauts. Glenn passed, and on January 16, 1998, Goldin announced that he would join the STS-95 crew.

Not everyone accepted the scientific case. John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists dismissed the medical rationale, saying, “It’s got nothing to do with medicine.” Some critics saw the seat as a reward for Glenn’s political support of President Clinton. NASA, for its part, built a full slate of medical tests around him, described below.

What the Mission Actually Studied

Glenn was only one part of a full science flight. The SPACEHAB module in Discovery’s payload bay carried more than 80 experiments. The crew released and later retrieved Spartan, a free-flying satellite that studied the Sun and the solar wind, and tested hardware planned for the next Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. They also deployed PANSAT, a small satellite built to test ways of picking up weak or noisy radio signals, and carried the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker, an astronomy payload mounted in the cargo bay.

The aging studies focused on Glenn and Duque, who served as a younger comparison subject. Researchers looked at balance and perception, immune response, bone and muscle density, metabolism, blood flow and sleep. Glenn took part in sleep-monitoring and protein-use experiments, and he also handled much of the mission’s photography and video.

Landing and Legacy

Discovery landed on Runway 33 at Kennedy Space Center at 12:04 p.m. Eastern time on November 7, 1998. With the drag chute left unused, the orbiter rolled 9,508 feet in 59 seconds before coming to a stop. The mission lasted 9 days, 19 hours, 54 minutes and 2 seconds, covered 134 orbits and traveled about 3.6 million miles.

Glenn left the Senate on January 3, 1999, at the end of the term he had announced would be his last. He had served since December 1974. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and died in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 2016, at age 95.

His age record held for 23 years, until older passengers began flying on commercial suborbital trips in 2021. He still holds the record for the oldest person to reach orbit. For many Americans who remembered the 1962 flight, STS-95 offered a rare chance to watch the same astronaut launch twice, once at the start of the space race and once on the shuttle near the end of the century.