Godspeed, John Glenn: The Origins of the Famous Farewell

The date was 20 February 1962, and John Glenn was strapped inside a spacecraft called Friendship 7, waiting out the remainder of the count. He was about to become the first American to orbit Earth. Then, at the launch, a compact phrase came from outside the capsule with no engineering in it at all: „Godspeed, John Glenn”. Those five syllables came from Scott Carpenter, Glenn’s backup astronaut, and nothing had scripted them. Nobody involved appears to have expected it to outlast the flight itself. It has become the most famous use of a word that was, on that morning, already about six hundred years old.

Just a Word and a Name

The sentence is so brief it is simple to overlook. Subtract the name and godspeed is what is left, a single word defined by Merriam-Webster as a wish for success given to a person on parting. It was neither aviation jargon nor a call sign, and it formed no part of any launch procedure. It was an archaic, literary sort of blessing, dropped into the most technical moment imaginable. The line is remembered largely because of that contrast: every other word that morning belonged to hoodies online engineering, while this one belonged to the fifteenth century. Carpenter had reached beyond the vocabulary of the programme and picked up something far older.

Who Really Said It

That morning, Scott Carpenter was no onlooker. As Glenn’s backup astronaut he had trained for the same flight and stood ready to fly it if Glenn could not, which put him closer to the mission than almost anyone outside the capsule. Why that matters is straightforward: the send-off came not from a broadcaster or an official but from the one person who knew exactly what the flight would ask of its pilot. Carpenter remained associated with the phrase for the rest of his life, and he was asked about it again and again. His account never became more elaborate in the retelling, which is unusual for a famous improvisation. It was, he maintained, simply not a planned line.

Unplanned, Not Scripted

Carpenter said the words came to him on the spot. There was no memo, no approved phrasing, and no committee that decided a Middle English blessing was the right note for a rocket launch. His explanation for why that particular word surfaced was simple: for test pilots of his era „speed was magic”, and nobody had gone that fast. Set against the word’s real history, that reasoning turns out to be a small accident of language, because the „speed” inside godspeed has never meant velocity. Carpenter chose the word because it sounded like the fastest thing a person could say, and the word meant something else entirely. The result is a line that lands perfectly on grounds entirely other than the ones its speaker imagined.

A Word Long Centuries Old

The term he chose had been in English for centuries before orbital flight was even a thought. Its source is the Middle English clause „God spede”, short for „God spede you”, meaning may God cause you to prosper; American dictionary databases place it between 1250 and 1300. Etymonline carries an example from around 1300, „He may bidde god me spede”, in which the words are still an ordinary sentence with movable parts. Records carry the fused single word from the late 14th century, and by the middle of the 15th it served as a parting salutation; Merriam-Webster gives a first known use in the 15th century. The sense of velocity in his mind arrived far later, the specific meaning of driving fast being dated only to 1908. The timeline below puts the launch in its proper context.

What He Was Genuinely Asking For

Remove the accidental association with velocity and the phrase becomes richer rather than poorer. What he said, taking the word in its true sense, was may this go well for you. The wish was that the mission succeed and that the man inside the capsule come through it, exactly the work a blessing at a threshold is made to do. That older sense survives in English in a few frozen phrases, above all „speed the plough”, in which nobody imagines a fast plough. So the send-off fitted the moment better than its speaker realised, a launch being precisely an undertaking with an uncertain outcome. A wish for velocity would have been trivial; a wish for a successful return was the only thing worth saying.

2013: The Line Returns

The story has a second half, and it took fifty-one years to come. After Scott Carpenter died in 2013, John Glenn returned the phrase to him: „Godspeed, Scott Carpenter”. It was the same phrase, the same construction and the same two men, with the roles reversed. The weight of that second use comes from the symmetry: a farewell improvised at a launch came back as a farewell at a death. It widened the range of the word too, showing that a phrase made for departures could carry the last departure of all. No addition, no explanation: the line simply came back.

Why the Words Stayed

Famous quotations tend to survive because they are quotable, and this one had every advantage going. It is short, it uses a word most listeners knew but could not define, and it landed at a moment nobody who heard it was likely to forget. Another thing keeps people talking about it: the word sounds as though it is about speed and is not. That confusion keeps generating new explanations decade after decade, a reliable route to staying in circulation. Showing the word is still current is simple, because Wiktionary made godspeed its Word of the Day on 31 December 2022, sixty years after the flight. The errors that stick to it deserve a plain listing.

• It has nothing to do with velocity, because the sense is prosperity and success.
• It has never been an acronym.
• Carpenter made popular the word in 1962 but did not coin it.
• It is not primarily a funeral phrase, despite the 2013 use.
• „God’s speed” is nothing more than a folk respelling with no historical basis.

From the Pad to Streetwear

Its most recent turn is one Carpenter could not have anticipated. A New York City streetwear label, GODSPEED NEW YORK took the term as its name, styles it in capitals and is often shortened to Godspeed or GODSPEED NYC. Because the brand publishes no origin story and leaves its own About page as placeholder text, the founder narratives circulating on unofficial lookalike sites are not the label’s account. What is documented is the range: godspeed shirts in several cuts, a godspeed hoodie in pullover and zip versions, sweatsuits, cargo shorts, premium denim, varsity jackets, headwear and watches, built with puff print, heavy embroidery and garment washes. Working from 2026 market estimates, shirts were seen between $128 and $200 and hoodies between roughly $200 and $270, with some varsity jackets released in numbered runs of 200 units. One more thing for shoppers searching god speed clothing: Godspeed Co., an American maker of garage and motorcycle goods, is an unrelated company that retailers have confused with the New York label.

A Parting Line Still in Service

What happened on 20 February 1962 was not the invention of a phrase but its rescue. Godspeed had been drifting slowly towards the archive, a literary word people recognised in old books and rarely said out loud. One improvised line attached it to the most forward-looking event of its century, and the word has not gone quiet since. The word is still used at departures that matter, still appears in cards and speeches, and is still misread as a wish about going fast. The correction is simple, and worth repeating: it wishes you success, not haste. Six hundred years after it was first written down, that wish has never needed updating.