By Kathy Sawyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 1998; Page A3

Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) has been granted a seat on a shuttle flight scheduled to lift off in October, 36 years after he became the first American to orbit Earth. He will be 77 by then and the oldest man ever in space.

NASA officials confirmed yesterday that the hero-turned-politician has been approved for the life sciences flight aboard the shuttle Discovery. But Glenn is not the only citizen being added to the shuttle roster.

Sources said that the space agency is preparing to fly schoolteacher Barbara Morgan to orbit at long last. Morgan was waiting on the ground at the launch site as a backup when fellow teacher Christa McAuliffe perished aboard the shuttle Challenger shortly after liftoff in January 1986. Morgan will soon join the astronaut corps, sources said, and other educators will be invited to apply.

Analysts said this week's decision reflects NASA's high level of confidence in the safety of the space shuttle, as well as a strong desire to begin to expand access to space to more people, as it prepares to begin orbital construction next summer of a multipurpose space station with Russia and other spacefaring nations.

NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin will explain these developments today at a noon news conference, officials said. Glenn plans to attend, but Morgan was said to be snowed-bound in McCall, Idaho, and besides, "Report cards are due next week."

Morgan, an elementary school teacher, spent months training for a flight and has remained active in NASA educational programs over the years.

Though Glenn's flight will involve legitimate, peer-reviewed science experiments on Glenn, according to informed sources, that is not the only basis for the decision to let him aboard. "NASA is not trying to make the case that he's flying only for science," said one. "It has to do with Glenn, the man – the whole package."

Glenn "jumped over every hurdle NASA put in front of him," the source said. This included "the most exhausting medical examination ever endured by a crew member in shuttle history."

"I understand there is a great deal of interest in this matter," a smiling Glenn told a crowd of reporters who staked out his Capitol Hill office yesterday as the news spread. "But today I have no comment on it. I look forward to discussing this in the future."

Besides having experience as a combat-seasoned Marine fighter pilot and astronaut, Glenn for years has taken an aggressive interest in fostering space-based research on aging processes. Astronauts in space share a number of symptoms with the elderly on the ground, such as weakened bone and muscle, lowered immunity and blood flow problems.

"We really think there are a number of cases where that joint research interest will help us solve problems for older people and astronauts," said Richard Sprott, deputy director of the National Institute on Aging, and for 10 years a liaison between his agency and NASA.

In addition, NASA has a 42-year medical record on Glenn, which allows a more useful evaluation of his responses, scientists indicated. Glenn has undergone regular physicals at Johnson Space Center in Houston as part of a long-term study of astronauts.

Glenn is the first U.S. member of the crew to be announced for the October flight aboard Discovery.

Not everyone is pleased with the developments. "The prospect is kind of troubling," said Alex Roland, chairman of the Duke University history department and a longtime critic of the human spaceflight program. "It suggests we're back to the pre-Challenger notion of the shuttle as entertainment and spectacle instead of as substantive research and working vehicle."

But space policy analyst John Logsdon of George Washington University said: "NASA is making a statement here that says, `We understand the shuttle and we believe we can fly at an acceptable level of risk,' which is what NASA thought in 1986 and was wrong. This time they have 12 more years of experience."

As for Glenn personally, he added, "There's a certain almost beauty to it – to go up early in life and then again at this late stage, and see how things have changed."

The world has changed considerably since Glenn climbed into the capsule Friendship 7 in 1962 to become the first American to orbit Earth. As author Tom Wolfe noted in his book, "The Right Stuff," the feeling at the time was that American rockets "always blew up! They were brave lads who had volunteered for a suicide mission!"

And when he splashed down safely in the sea, 10 months after cosmonaut Russian Yuri Gagarin had beaten the Americans into orbit, Glenn changed the psyche of the nation, according to Walter A. McDougall's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the space program, "The Heavens and the Earth." Few events, "not even the landing on the moon," he wrote, "matched the social release into which John Glenn, after five hours in space ... incredulously stepped. It seemed that he had given Americans back their self-respect, and more than that – it seemed Americans dared again to hope."

Special correspondent Amy Joyce contributed to this report.