henry (09/15/82)
John Young was indeed piloting Columbia on STS-1, glasses and all. (I specifically saw a mention of him putting them on before landing the beast.) The point is, John Young did *not* wear glasses when he first joined the astronaut corps, many years ago. There is fundamentally no particularly strong reason why bad vision should keep one from being an astronaut, assuming of course that it is correctible to 20-20 via glasses. The thing is, the supply of would-be astronauts much exceeds the demand. The problem is not to find them but to thin them out. One easy way to do this is to set the qualifications higher than is strictly necessary. The same method is applied elsewhere as well.