John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, has launched an attack on the adiminstration of George W Bush after Nasa was forced to retire the space shuttles last year - leaving the US dependent on its former Cold War foe Russia to get astronauts into space.
Former Sen. John Glenn answers a question at the Kennedy Space Centre Photo: AP
10:06AM GMT 20 Feb 2012
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Fifty years after Glenn's groundbreaking flight on Feb 20, 1962, the former
senator said he regrets that ignoble end of the heated space race that
captivated the world in the second half of the 20th century.
"I regret that that is the way things have developed," Glenn told a
crowd at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Saturday night, part of
a series of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of his flight.
"We spent over $100 billion dollars putting the space station up there.
It's too bad in the previous administration the decision was made to end the
shuttle, so now we have to go somewhere else to even get up to our station,"
said Glenn, who served as a Democratic senator from Ohio between 1975 to
1999.
The United States grounded its aging shuttles last year due to high operating
costs and to free up funds for a new generation of spacecraft that can fly
farther from Earth. More money would have been needed years earlier in order
for the new ships to be ready by the time the old ones were retired.
Glenn parlayed his political connections into a long-awaited return to space
in 1998 when, at age 77, he flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery as a
research subject for experiments on aging sponsored by the National
Institutes of Health.
Now 90, Glenn, a retired Marine Corps pilot, said research is the most
important benefit of the US space programme and lauded the decision to
extend the International Space Station's life to at least 2020 from 2015.
"People say, 'Well, what good is research?' I think every bit of progress made by human beings has been made because somebody was curious about the unknown," Glenn said.
"If there's one thing we have learned through the history of our country, it's that money spent on basic research has a way of paying back in the future beyond anything we ever see at the outset," he said
