FIVE KEY GROUNDLINGS

Nearly 35,000 people contributed in substantive ways to the space flight of Astronaut John Glenn. Besides his fellow astronauts and a staff of 2,000 at Cape Canaveral, 15,000 men stood by for recovery or rescue operations on ships stretched across the Atlantic, 500 technicians manned 18 tracking stations on four continents and two oceans, and 15,000 scientists, technicians and factory workers who had labored for nearly four years on the space program left their imprint on the flight. Among members of this huge team, five men stand out:

Robert R. Gilruth, 48, director of Project Mercury and head of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, is the driving force behind the U.S. manned space-flight program. An aeronautical engineer with both bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Minnesota, Bob Gilruth won international recognition in the '40s for his research on the characteristics of aircraft in flight, switched to spacecraft after the Government picked him in 1945 to create an organization to conduct freeflight experiments (and found time along the way to invent the nation's first successful hydrofoil system). He pushed the early work on manned satellites, was named to direct Project Mercury in 1958, set up the vital standards that made last week's successful flight possible--and stuck to them under pressure. Gilruth, who with Glenn received NASA's Distinguished Service Medal from President Kennedy last week, is already busy directing studies on the next U.S. giant step into space: Project Apollo, which aims at putting three Americans on the moon. He considers the U.S. space effort the tortoise to Russia's hare--but feels that the tortoise will soon pass the hare. Says he: "When we do pass him, I think we will astound even ourselves at what we can accomplish."

Walter C. Williams Jr., 42, operations director for Project Mercury and the overall coordinator of Glenn's flight, handled the prelaunch and launch operations and all the other ground support activities, including tracking and recovery. He had the final say on whether and when the flight would be made, with authority to countermand the orders of everyone but the range safety officer, who had absolute power to destroy the missile in the first five minutes of flight if it veered off course irretrievably. A short, crew-cut aeronautical engineer, Williams worked in aeronautical research after graduating from Louisiana State University, later was project engineer for an experimental program for the X-1 (the first airplane to break the sound barrier) and directed the research program for the more advanced X-15. He took charge of the shoot last week despite a severe sinus infection, analyzed reports from 20 experts on every phase of the preparations through the long, tense hours before the firing. Last week his vital decision to leave Glenn's retrorockets attached to the space capsule until it re-entered the atmosphere left Williams still shaken three hours later.

Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., 37, flight director, controlled Friendship 7 from the moment the Atlas-D roared off the launch pad, had to make the heavy decisions about whether to let Glenn make a third orbit and when and where to bring him to earth if further trouble developed. Sitting in the Mercury Control Center, Kraft was fed a steady stream of monitored data about the condition of Glenn and the capsule, plus the prediction, cranked out by computers every 1 1/2 sec. from Greenbelt, Md., of where Friendship 7 would land if the flight had to be aborted at any given time. Last November, when the capsule carrying Enos, the space chimp, ran into trouble on the second of three planned orbits, Chris Kraft needed just five seconds to decide to abort the mission, timed the firing of the braking rockets so well that the capsule splashed into the Atlantic within 30 miles of a rescue ship. A graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and one of the original members of the Manned Spacecraft Center, Kraft helps coordinate Mercury support activities when not directing a flight.

John Yardley, 37, base manager, capsule designer, and an engineer for McDonnell Aircraft Corp., the space capsule's builders, has responsibility for the proper functioning of the capsule's multiplicity of systems, subsystems and backup systems. Handsome and softspoken, he spent more than a year preparing the Friendship 7 for its orbital flight. It was chiefly his advice that led to the decision to leave Glenn's retrorockets attached on Friendship 7's reentry. Yardley graduated from Iowa State College and earned a master's degree in applied mechanics from Washington University in 1950, worked as an aircraft maintenance officer for the Navy before joining McDonnell. Named project engineer for spacecraft design, he masterminded a team that beat out other companies by coming up with a space-capsule design similar to that on NASA dream boards, himself devised the capsule's complicated safety system, which provides an alternate or "backup" mechanism for each of its basic functions. After the first mock-up was finished, Yardley worked closely with John Glenn to perfect the capsule, incorporating many of Glenn's suggestions. The two became firm friends, like to spend their rare moments of relaxation water-skiing together.

William K. Douglas, 39, flight surgeon, declared Glenn physically fit for the flight after making a final examination, rode up with him in the gantry elevator to see that he was properly placed in the capsule and that all the electronic monitors attached to his body were working, then carefully monitored and fed Glenn's in-flight physical reactions to Chris Kraft. Douglas was certified in aviation medicine in 1956; he took his premed study at the University of New Mexico, his M.D. at the University of Texas, and postgraduate training at Johns Hopkins University. He could write a medical textbook on Glenn alone, having spent months probing, testing, documenting and cataloguing every aspect of Glenn's physique and physiology. After the flight, he set to work comparing these findings with Glenn's in-flight measurements and another set of postflight tests to chronicle Glenn's reaction to space.

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