The American astronaut made his first space flight on a Mercury spacecraft in February 1962. At the time, he was forty-one years old, not a very young man. Afterwards, he made numerous requests to go to space again, but all of them were declined. Desperate, the astronaut reached out directly to President Clinton and, with his personal approval, made 132 orbits around the Earth. That year the world's oldest astronaut turned seventy-seven.