John Glenn told high school and college students alike Tuesday that having an “inordinate curiosity” is the key to uncovering and developing the new products and methods that improve the world.

Because Americans are a “questing, curious” people, the United States is in the vanguard of scientific development and technology, the former astronaut and U.S. senator told audiences at the University of Maine and Bangor High School.

But Glenn also voiced worries about the state of science and mathematics education in U.S. schools. He worries that the United States could slip off the leading edge, in part, because of the churning of science and math teachers out of the profession.

He also stated his distaste for, as he considers it, the premature arrival of space tourism, ushered in by California millionaire Dennis Tito who, having paid the Russian government a reported $20 million, is currently aboard the international space station.

The 79-year-old Ohoian was at UM to deliver the third annual William S. Cohen lecture on international policy and commerce. Because he was in the area, the Bangor School Department was able to piggyback its fourth annual Cohen aspirations symposium onto Glenn’s visit.

Glenn and former Defense Secretary Cohen spoke to the sophomore and junior classes at Bangor High School at 8 a.m. and then Glenn delivered his lecture at UM later that morning. Sandwiched in between, the two, who served in the U.S. Senate together, visited with university engineering faculty and students who explained research work they are undertaking, including a project for NASA.

At both talking stops, Glenn hit on the same themes, told the same stories, and faced almost identical questions.

His assessment of Tito’s tourist trip, was blunt: “The whole idea stinks,” Glenn said.

For now, space travel ought to be devoted to research, he said. But he also could understand the cash-strapped Russian space program’s attraction to Tito’s money.

“It will be great when we’re able to take up tourists, but it’s not the time,” he said.

When asked for his “best piece of advice,” Glenn told the Bangor High students that the common trait of all those people who have changed the direction of the world is that they had an “inordinate curiosity about everything around them.”

Out of curiosity arises new research that leads to new products, according to Glenn. All human progress comes from someone who asked whether something could be done differently and better.

But while the United States has been at the forefront of scientific developments, he is worried about whether it can remain there.

He sees a hazard for the future because “our young people are not coming out of our education system [with the abilities] to staff the industries of the future,” he warned.

Glenn recently served as chairman of the National Commission on Math and Science Education Teaching for the 21st Century. He is worried because a quarter of those teaching math and a fifth of those teaching science were not trained to teach those subjects, he said. On top that, there is a detrimental churning of math and science teachers, with a third of them leaving the profession after just three years.

“Everything we have depends on math and science for development,” he said.

One of the students at Bangor High School asked Glenn how he felt sitting atop the Atlas rocket in 1962 waiting to blast off, and whether he worried about systems failing.

Glenn answered with a question: “How would you feel if you were sitting atop 2 million parts built by the lowest bidder on a government contract?”

But then he added, because astronauts look forward to blasting off, “The biggest fear is that you won’t go.”

One of the original Mercury Astronauts, Glenn in 1962 became the second person ever, and the first American, to orbit the earth. He went into space again in 1998, the oldest person ever to lift off, aboard the shuttle Discovery.

Glenn’s trajectory into space can be traced back to a day when he was 8 or 9 in eastern Ohio. He said that he was driving along with his father when they went past a grass airstrip where a pilot was taking people up for $5 a person.

Glenn said he and his father went up in the open-cockpit biplane, belted in with a single broad strap. As soon as they got aloft, he said, “I was hooked.”

When he was starting college, he took flying lessons through a program in which the government paid for the lessons and one could earn credit toward college physics courses.

When World War II broke out, he quit college and became a Marine Corps pilot. He flew combat missions in the Pacific and then again during the Korean War. After the war, he became a test pilot, and in 1959 was selected as an astronaut.

Before seeing demonstrations of UM research between his talks, the College of Engineering inducted Glenn into the Francis Crowe Society, which is named for an alumnus who was the chief engineer on the Hoover Dam.

Glenn was shown three research projects. One dealt with a computer program that allows the user to sketch a scene that is then compared to images in a database in order to discern similar patterns, or to find the location the person sketched.

Glenn also heard an explanation of work being done at UM for NASA on the structural integrity of connectors and joints on the under-development X-38 spacecraft, which will act as a lifeboat and ambulance for the international space station crew.