John Glenn

John Glenn (born July 18, 1921, Cambridge, Ohio, U.S.—died December 8, 2016, Columbus, Ohio) was the first U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth, completing three orbits in 1962. (Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, had made a single orbit of Earth in 1961.)

Glenn joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942. He then joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1943 and flew 59 missions in the South Pacific during World War II. In the Korean War, he flew 90 missions, and in the last nine days of the war, he shot down three MiGs. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, in 1954 and flew on test projects involving the F-8 fighter. He made the first transcontinental flight with an average supersonic speed in 1957 when he flew from California to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1959.

Of the “Mercury Seven,” the U.S. military pilots selected in 1959 to be the first astronauts, Glenn was the oldest. He served as a backup pilot for Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Virgil I. Grissom, who made the first two U.S. suborbital flights into space. Glenn was selected for the first orbital flight, Mercury-Atlas 6, and on February 20, 1962, his space capsule, Friendship 7, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its orbit ranged from approximately 161 to 261 km (100 to 162 miles) in altitude. The flight went mostly according to plan, aside from a faulty thruster that forced Glenn to control Friendship 7 manually. A faulty switch onboard also relayed the inaccurate message to mission control that the heat shield had been released. He was told not to release the pack of retro-rockets on the rear of the spacecraft after they had fired. (Mission control hoped that if the heat shield had been released, the straps of the retrorocket pack would hold the shield long enough for Glenn to survive reentry.) Glenn made three orbits, landing nearly 5 hours after launch in the Atlantic Ocean near Grand Turk island in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He became a national hero.

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Glenn retired from the space program in 1964 to seek the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio. (Space-program observers generally believed that he would not have been allowed to fly again out of concern that a national hero be put at undue risk.) However, one month after he announced his candidacy, he slipped in the bathroom of his home and hit his head on the bathtub, severely injuring his inner ear. He withdrew from the campaign to recover. He left the Marine Corps and became the vice president for domestic corporate development of the soft drink maker Royal Crown Cola International Ltd. in 1965 and later became president of the company. In 1970 he ran for the Senate again but lost narrowly in the primary. He was elected U.S. senator from that state in 1974 and was reelected three times thereafter. Glenn was unsuccessful, however, in his bid to become the 1984 Democratic presidential candidate. During his time in the Senate, Glenn focused on nuclear proliferation, wasteful government spending, and aging.

On October 29, 1998, Glenn returned to space as a payload specialist on a nine-day mission (STS-95) aboard the space shuttle Discovery. At that time the oldest person ever to travel in space, Glenn at age 77 participated in experiments on the Spacehab module that studied similarities between the aging process and the body’s response to weightlessness. His presence on STS-95 was controversial. NASA officials asserted that Glenn’s presence would contribute to research on the aging process, but critics contended that his return to space was a publicity stunt with minimal benefits.

Glenn retired from the Senate in 1999. He helped found the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy in 2000 (now part of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs) at Ohio State University, Columbus, where in 1998 he had become an adjunct professor in the political science department. In 2012 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.