John Glenn drove the coolest car of any astronaut

[JohnnyRingo]

He was my senator, but John Glenn was definitely a man of the world:

When most people think about what the original group of American astronauts were driving back in the ‘60s, usually Corvettes come to mind. This is a safe bet, because six of the original Mercury Seven astronauts drove ‘Vettes. You math whizzes may note that there’s one astronaut left over. That astronaut was John Glenn, and the car he chose over a Corvette had a quarter the number of cylinders and was about half the size. The first American in orbit drove an NSU Prinz.

In the early ‘60s, a tiny, two-cylinder NSU Prinz wasn’t just a weird car for an American astronaut, it was a weird car for an American, period. For those of you improbably unfamiliar with the NSU Prinz, it was a tiny, rear-engined car designed and built by a company better known for their motorcycles.

It was a bit more proper of a car than other German microcars of the era, like the Isetta or the Messerschmitt, in that it could seat four (well, the back seat was really for 5/6 scale humans) but in the United States this little car would have been dwarfed by the only foreign car most Americans actually knew about, a Volkswagen Beetle.

If you’re wondering why John Glenn decided to shun a V8 fiberglass land-rocket in favor of a car so tiny it made his seat in the Mercury capsule almost feel roomy, we actually know exactly why, because John Glenn told us himself...

Continued here via Jalopnik:

http://jalopnik.com/john-glenn-had-the-coolest-car-of-any-astronaut-1789933831

[Kali]

1. cool!

thanks for posting