On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. An Atlas launch vehicle propelled a Mercury spacecraft into Earth orbit and enabled Glenn to circle Earth three times. The flight lasted a total of four hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds before his Friendship 7 spacecraft splashed down in the ocean.
The Soviet Union had launched the world’s first spacecraft, Sputnik, in October 1957 and had also sent the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space in April 1961. NASA responded by sending the first American, Alan Shephard, into space in May 1961, but
Shepard’s flight was only a suborbital lob, whereas Gagarin had orbited Earth.
Glenn was the fifth person to go to space, preceded by NASA astronauts Shepard and Virgil Grissom and Soviets Gagarin and Gherman Titov. (Tito spent a full day in space surpassing Grissom’s 15 minute flight.)
During the Cold War between the United States and USSR, Glenn was celebrated as a hero. After leaving NASA he became a US senator and later became the oldest person to go into space.
John Glenn was born July 18, 1921 in Ohio. He left college to join the military in the Second World War. As a marine pilot he flew combat missions in the Pacific. Later Glenn trained pilots and then served in the Korean War. After Korea he became a test pilot. In 1957 he set a speed record for flying across the US, traveling at 726 mph.
Glenn resigned from NASA in 1964 and went into politics. Ohio elected him to the US Senate in 1974 where he served for 25 years. After leaving the Senate in 1999 he became adjunct professor at Ohio State University. In 1999 NASA renamed its Field Center in Cleveland, Ohio, John H. Glenn Research Center.
In 1998 NASA announced that Glenn would be making a second spaceflight.The purpose of his flight was to study the effects of space flight on the elderly. NASA doctors had followed
Glenn’s health since he first became an astronaut. They were able to use that data to understand how spaceflight affected him on his second flight. He flew with six other astronauts on the STS-95 mission of the spaceshuttle Discovery. At 77 years old he became the oldest person to fly in space.
Glenn died on Dec. 8, 2016. He was 95 years old.
The last astronaut survivor of the Cold War era is Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to orbit Earth. In June 1963 she circled Earth 48 times spending almost three days in space. She is the only woman to have been on a solo space mission.
Sources: NASA and Wikipedia
