By Amy Geiszler-Jones

When John Glenn blasts off to space in the scheduled Oct. 29 mission aboard the Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery, among those wishing him "Godspeed" the second time around will be WSU distinguished professor emeritus Randy Chambers.

Chambers, who has been involved in the aerospace field for four decades, has more than a passing interest in Glenn's historic return to space.

It was Chambers who helped train a young Glenn bound to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

"He was very determined he would be a success. He was diligent about his practice and his precision," Chambers remembers. Glenn is more than likely approaching his current training with that same mindset, Chambers says.

"He never seemed to have enough runs," Chambers says, referring to Glenn's rides aboard the Navy's human centrifuge, a device with a 50-foot arm that produces accelerations up to 40 Gs. Its high-speed gondola simulates the linear and angular acceleration forces that space travelers feel during launch and re-entry.

Chambers was in charge of a 12-member human factors team that was setting the standards and designing the equipment for an unknown field before Glenn's launch.

"It was exciting because we were developing and creating a lot of systems that would be used. The big question was how to protect the astronaut during the entire flight under all these strange and unusual circumstances. No one in this country had been launched before on a rocket to those altitudes and velocities."

Oftentimes, it was Chambers himself who tried out some of the new gadgets, such as the "contour couch," an individually molded seat designed to fit into 36 cubic feet, the size of the Mercury Capsule Friendship 7 that Glenn piloted in 1962.

In debriefs following the flight, Glenn told Chambers and the other trainers that the training had been extremely similar to what he had encountered on his flight.

Chambers thinks that Glenn’s early training experience will be very important for his present flight, even though there will be differences ranging from crew and craft sizes to time in orbit.

Those early training days were long and the schedule was tight at the U.S. Naval Air Development Center in what is now Warminster, Pa., where Glenn trained between 1959-63, Chambers recalls.

Chambers left the Pennsylvania facility in 1968 to become the chief life scientist and head of human factors engineering for four years at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia. Later in his career, he worked with the military's space program as the principal scientist in the U.S. Army Research Institute. He joined the WSU faculty in 1988 and retired in 1996.

Chambers still continues his interest in the space field, running his company Human Factors Engineering and Science LLC and assisting the Kansas Cosmosphere in its space education, satellite and space camp academy programs. This past summer he went to Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Ala., with his grandson to a NASA space camp.

In a basement carrel in Ablah Library, Chambers is working on a book, "Getting Off the Planet," about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, using his personal accounts in the training of astronauts for those missions and accounts from others. He plans to donate his personal collection of photos, daily run logs and directives to Ablah Library's special collections.

The fact that Glenn, 77, is returning to space at an older age is also more than a passing interest for the 71-year-old Chambers.

"There's a great deal of interest in whether or not life support processes are strengthened or not by returning to space," Chambers says. "Some argue that there's a benefit from space flight to the human body." The training has some physical benefits and Chambers notes that the centrifuge has been used as a therapeutic device.

Chambers doesn't discount that Glenn's return to space may be in part a publicity event for NASA, but he says there is a scientific value to Glenn's trip, as well.

"Some feel that living in space will extend life," Chambers says. "You're living in an environment where you don't have to be fighting gravity all the time."

As part of his ongoing research and collaboration with the Cosmosphere, he is working with former astronaut Scott Carpenter's project on determining whether an undersea habitat could be used as a training facility for astronauts.

It was Carpenter who said the now-famous phrase on Glenn's first historic mission Feb. 20, 1962: "Godspeed, John Glenn."