With those words, 77-year-old astronaut John Glenn ended his nine-day adventure in space, his second in 36 years and a first as the oldest person to orbit the Earth.

Glenn's comment came moments after the shuttle Discovery touched down on schedule and without a glitch at 12:04 p.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center.

To NASA's relief, Discovery's damaged drag chute did not pop out as the shuttle lined up with the runway on final approach and glided on in.

While billed as a mission thick with technological and science experiments, it nevertheless has been dominated by the fulfillment of a senior citizen's wish to return to space 36 years after orbiting the planet on the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule.

Skeptics challenged the mission after its announcement last January 16 by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, arguing that the benefits of determining the effects of weightlessness on one person would be negligible.

They also wondered if the presence of Glenn, a Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio, might not be attributed more to his loyalty to President Clinton during a campaign-spending investigation than to hard science.

But the cynicism has been muted since the bespectacled Glenn crawled into the shuttle wearing his orange, 83-pound spacesuit and was hurled into the sky October 29 by rockets of staggering power.

The focus after liftoff has been less on science and technology than on how the old man would do in space, and Glenn knew it.

A PR coup for NASA

During an interview Thursday with Vice President Al Gore and fellow Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, Glenn joked that he and Carpenter were going to return and open a retirement home.

"You don't need a walker up here and you don't need to worry about osteoporosis or a cane or anything like that, because you just float across the room," Glenn said.

"There is not anything like a broken hip or anything like that, and if you have trouble sleeping at night, why it's no problem because there's another one coming up in 45 minutes."

The mission -- officially designated as STS-95 -- also has been a public relations coup for NASA in another regard.

Shuttles have been going into space since 1981, and much of the public long ago directed its attention elsewhere. Only a few hundred media representatives attend such launches. But for Discovery's launch, NASA received 4,000 requests for credentials, and about 3,000 of them were filled.

NASA also decided to arm its guards with semiautomatic weapons, an unusual precaution explained as "common sense" under the circumstances.

Veteran launch watchers say the approximately 250,000 people who attended from other parts of the world -- and the estimated 1 million who watched it locally in a festive mood -- was reminiscent of the launches preceding the Apollo landings on the moon. That program ended in 1972.

A fruitful mission


In an image captured by the Spartan satellite, the sun's corona surrounds a disk on the satellite used to block the full glare of the sun. The bright object to the left is Venus.

The mission has also been enhanced by the astronauts' successful execution of their responsibilities.

They completed 83 experiments, successfully deployed and recaptured the 1.5-ton (1.35 metric-ton) Spartan satellite and deployed a smaller communications satellite.

They tested hardware for the Hubble Space Telescope along with a new "vision system," robotic camera and communication system for spacewalking astronauts that will be used on the new International Space Station.

As Cmdr. Curt Brown said during one of the many interviews arranged for the crew during its eight-day, 20-hour mission, "Everything has just been outstanding."

No one has stood out more than John Herschel Glenn Jr., who was grounded by President John F. Kennedy as too valuable to orbit again, but refused to give up on his dream of one day returning to space.

"You know," Glenn said Thursday during an interview with media from around the world, "old folks can have dreams, too, as well as young folks, and then work toward them. And to have a dream like this come true for me is just a terrific experience."