John Glenn (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was a United States Marine Corps aviator, engineer, astronaut, businessman, and politician. In 1957, he made the first supersonic transcontinental flight across the United States. He was one of the Mercury Seven, military test pilots selected in 1959 by NASA as the nation’s first astronauts. On February 20, 1962, Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, and the fifth person and third American in space. A member of the Democratic Party, Glenn was first elected to the Senate in 1974 and served for 24 years, until January 1999. In 1998, while still a sitting senator, Glenn flew on Space Shuttle Discovery’s STS-95 mission, making him, at age 77, the oldest person to fly in space and the only person to fly in both the Mercury and the Space Shuttle programs. Glenn, both the oldest and the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven, died at the age of 95 in 2016. (More from Wikipedia)
I go back a long way with Under Appreciation.
Probably the most memorable events of my schoolboy days were seeing the early spaceflights. Regular school went by the boards; the teachers brought in their portable TV sets, and we would all crowd around to watch, beginning with Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight in 1961 and John Glenn’s trip in orbit the following year.
I was amazed to find that the intervening sub-orbital flight by Gus Grissom was almost completely forgotten; I just couldn’t understand it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and was reminded that all didn’t go smoothly with that mission; though the whole flight was barely 15 minutes long, the capsule started filling up with water upon splashdown, and Grissom very nearly drowned when water started getting into his space suit also.
Besides this second American flight into space, Gus Grissom was also on one of the Gemini spacecraft and thus the first American to go into space twice. Gus Grissom was among the three astronauts that were killed in the cabin fire during a test for the planned launch of Apollo 1 in January 1967, twice illustrating that being an astronaut is one of the most dangerous professions today. Virgin Galactic had a disastrous launch just last October, killing the pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injuring the co-pilot Peter Siebold.
(Year 5 Review)
