Editorial: In witness to John Glenn's orbit

To the younger members of our newspaper audience, John Glenn's flight in 1962 may not seem like that big a deal.

The idea of space travel comes across a little, well, almost ordinary if you grew up with it simply as an everyday backdrop of life.

But to those of us old enough to remember the launch - at the time, awed by Glenn's courage, engulfed by the spirit of competition with the Russians in the space race, nervously wondering whether his Mercury-Atlas spacecraft would survive the re-entry, mesmerized by the seeming fantasy of a man in orbit around the globe, glued to the television coverage, inspired by the sense of history, overwhelmed by all the thrilling unanswered questions of the universe that suddenly opened up to us, prayerful - this was no everyday backdrop of life.

To those of us old enough to remember, this was the new frontier, the dawn of a new age of discovery and adventure.

If you ever sneak away from the lights of the metropolitan area and look up on a clear moonless night at the burst of stars splattered as if from a paintbrush across the drape of an endless dark sky, there you'll experience what it felt like to witness John Glenn's five-hour flight.

You look up at an ocean of starry sky like that and it's like living in 1962 again.

Yes, to those of us old enough to remember, Glenn's orbit was not just his call to heroism. It also was our call to something greater than ourselves.

On his remarkable return to space at the age of 77 on the Space Shuttle in 1998, Glenn himself described the awesomeness of space flight this way: "To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible."

In a real way, Glenn's orbit opened the door to the Space Age, and almost all of the technological advances that have taken place since are related in one way or another to that exploration.

It is virtually impossible to overstate the immense impact that has had on human life on the planet. The digital revolution owes its existence to space exploration.

And of course, that advance into space has unleashed a torrent of understanding about the universe and our place in it.

We understand today, better than ever before, how precious our planet is, how much obligation we have to this "pale blue dot," as Carl Sagan called it, that provides the only home for every living thing science has so far ever encountered.

Protecting this home, ultimately, has been an obligation to ourselves and at the same time to that greater something beyond ourselves.

Let that obligation be John Glenn's legacy. And let it beckon to the new generation now left to carry out his mission.