Col. John Glenn’s remains to be escorted through QAC to Arlington National Cemetery April 6th
CENTREVILLE - The remains of Col. John Glenn (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) will be escorted through Queen Anne’s County on Thursday, April 6, 2017. Maryland State Police estimate that the military escort should be traveling from Dover Airforce Base, south on Rt. 301, passing by the Route 19 / 301 intersection by 6:30 a.m., approximately. Queen Anne’s County citizens are encouraged to stand along the route to pay their last respects to this hero as he travels to his final resting spot in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Some suggested areas to await funeral escort:
- Rt19 / 301 – Stand in the field along the highway
- 301 / Rolling Bridge Road – Stand in the field along the highway
- Clay Drive, Queenstown – Stand along the service road located near 301 / Del Rhodes Ave (in front of Royal Farms and Animal Welfare League)
NASA’s Profile of John Glenn
Former astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn died Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016, at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus.
Glenn, who served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was one of NASA's original seven Mercury astronauts. His flight on Friendship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962, showed the world that America was a serious contender in the space race with the Soviet Union. It also made Glenn an instant hero.
His mission of almost nine days on the space shuttle orbiter Discovery, launched Oct. 29, 1998, when he was 77, made him the oldest human to venture into space. On Discovery he participated in a series of tests on the aging process. The aging population was one focus of his work as a U.S. senator.
Glenn was described as "humble, funny, and generous" by Trevor Brown, dean of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, in a statement joined by the Glenn family. "Even after leaving public life, he loved to meet with citizens, school children in particular. He thrilled to music and had a weakness for chocolate."
Glenn will always be remembered as the first American to orbit the Earth during those tentative, challenging, daring days when humans were just beginning to venture beyond the atmosphere that had nurtured them since the species began.
While Glenn's flight on Friendship 7 was a glorious national triumph, problems arose that could have spelled disaster. The first was a failure of the automatic control system.
A scheduled 30-minute test to determine whether Glenn could fly the capsule manually became a matter of life and death when the automatic system went out at the end of the first orbit.
"I went to manual control and continued in that mode during the second and third orbits, and during re-entry," Glenn recalled later. He had been confident he could do it. "The malfunction just forced me to prove very rapidly what had been planned over a longer period of time."
Another problem seemed even more serious -- telemetry indicated the spacecraft's heat shield was loose. It seemed possible that Glenn and the spacecraft would be incinerated on re-entry. Much of the world held its breath.
Glenn left the retrorocket pack in place to steady the heat shield during re-entry. "It made for a very spectacular re-entry from where I was sitting," he said. Big chunks of the burning material came flying by the window.
He wasn't sure whether the flaming debris was the rocket pack or the heat shield breaking up. "Fortunately," he told an interviewer," it was the rocket pack -- or I wouldn't be answering these questions."
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