On Oct. 29, John Glenn became the oldest man in space. Glenn's picture-perfect lift-off 36 years after he became the first American to orbit the earth has been called a lot of things: a boondoggle with no genuine scientific benefit; quid pro quo from the White House in exchange for Glenn's political support; an ideal opportunity to study the effects of aging in space. I think it's actually just brilliant PR.

Imagine being part of the space agency's PR team. A situation analysis might recap how far the agency has come since John Glenn made his first orbit around the earth in 1962. Then, NASA embodied America's dreams, its competitive spirit, its quest for heroes. The nation, even the world, huddled around TV screens to see grainy pictures of Glenn boarding his Mercury rocket. Nearly two decades later, the Space Shuttle program attracted new attention to NASA. Years of successful missions made shuttle flights so commonplace that few people paid them much attention. Tragedy struck in 1986 when Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after take off, killing its crew of seven, among them a school teacher named Christa McAuliffe. The space agency's last significant ink since that tragedy came well over a year ago when the world waited for something else to go wrong aboard the MIR Space Station.

NASA exists on public support. It has submitted a 1999 budget request of $13.5 billion to Con-gress, an organization that often seems to conduct more tests to check the changing winds of public opinion than NASA's own scientific experimentation. To survive in that atmosphere, NASA needs strong public support, a familiar situation for PR pros. The need for positive publicity is constant. But how to get it? John Glenn has been lobbying for a return to space since his early days on the Special Committee on Aging. When tests supported Glenn's premise that aging research could benefit from experiments in space, strategists at NASA must have been salivating. At 77, the bonafide American hero and senator from Ohio would become the oldest man in space. He would prove age didn't have to be a barrier. The story angles were myriad. The coverage could be enormous.

And it has been. For weeks leading up to the launch, every angle of Glenn's story splashed across newspapers, TV newscasts and radio broadcasts all over the nation and all around the world. On Oct. 29, CNN's Web fielded nearly a half a million hits per minute – a new record – just before the launch. Sites were inundated as Net users tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to log on to live web casts of the launch. And journalists around the world reported how the residents of Perth, Australia, lit up their town so Glenn could see it from outer space, just as they had during his flight in 1962.

Houston and Cape Canaveral are back in the spotlight. NASA has stolen front page headlines from President Clinton, Ken Starr, Bill Gates and even the mid-term elections. And NASA may actually gather some useful data for aging research. If it had been my PR plan, I'd be ecstatic with the results. Wouldn't you?

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