For Cravero, whose only eyeball experience with the centrifuge was seeing it, the encounter led to a small-business plan to make money off it while spreading the word of its historic significance.
He has just started renting out, for proms, trade shows, weddings, and other events, the circular room where Glenn and dozens of other astronauts - from the Mercury Seven to the first few shuttle crews - learned how many g-forces they could withstand.
Cravero has converted research labs adjacent to the centrifuge into offices available for leasing, and he is supporting a local effort to develop a museum, a science/technology/engineering library, and a learning center at the site.
"The biggest accomplishment in American history in the 20th century was sending a man into space and landing on the moon," Cravero, 42, of Riegelsville, said, the centrifuge looming overhead. "This facility played a huge role in accomplishing that task."
His efforts come as the U.S. space program winds down, with the final two shuttle flights scheduled to take place by the end of June.
Thursday is the 50th anniversary of another centrifuge alumnus' achievement: Alan Shepard's becoming the first American in space. In commemoration, Johnsville Centrifuge & Science Museum Inc. has made arrangements to transport to Warminster that day the centrifuge's original gondola, replaced in 1964 by the one still attached. The museum group found it at a Smithsonian warehouse in Maryland two years ago.
It is the gondola in which Glenn suffered EIEOs and barely endured 16 g's.
"You had to strain every muscle to keep enough blood in your head to keep from passing out," Glenn said in a phone interview last week from his office at Ohio State University, where he heads the advisory board to the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. "It wasn't a pleasure trip."
