John Glenn

American astronaut and US senator

• Born: July 18, 1921
• Birthplace: Cambridge, Ohio

On February 20, 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in a flight that reduced the Soviet Union’s early lead in the space race. Glenn later served as a US senator from Ohio in four consecutive terms from 1974 to 1998, made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1984, and, in 1998, became the oldest person to fly in space during his flight aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

Early Life

John Glenn was born in Cambridge, Ohio, to John and Clara Glenn. Glenn and his sister Jean grew up in New Concord, Ohio, a largely Presbyterian town of about two thousand inhabitants where their father ran a heating and plumbing business and, at one time, also owned a Chevrolet car dealership. Glenn was an honor student at New Concord High School and played several varsity sports. After graduating from high school in 1939, Glenn enrolled in Muskingum College (now Muskingum University) in New Concord, an institution affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Glenn served in the choir of the local Presbyterian church, and later became a Sunday school teacher. When he was in the Mercury program, Glenn told the press, “I am a Presbyterian and I take my religion very seriously.” Glenn played on the Muskingum football team and enrolled in a Navy-sponsored civilian pilot training program.

After the United States’ entry into World War II, Glenn joined the Navy in March 1942. He took advantage of an opportunity to receive his commission in the Marine Corps at Corpus Christi Naval Air Training Center and, in March 1943, became a Marine lieutenant and Navy aviator. Returning briefly to New Concord, Glenn married Anna Castor (whom he had known since age six) in April 1943, before being shipped out to the Pacific theater. From February 1944 to February 1945, Glenn flew fifty-nine combat missions in F4U Corsairs for VMO-155, based at Roi-Namur and Kwajalein, against Japanese positions in the Marshall Islands campaign. His unit employed napalm bombs as its primary ordnance on the dive bomb missions. For his World War II service, Glenn earned two Distinguished Flying Crosses (DFCs) and ten Air Medals.

Glenn served at several Marine air bases in the United States from February 1945 to December 1946 and did patrol duty in northern China and Guam from 1947 to 1949. While in China, Glenn flew Corsairs with VMF-218, based near Beijing. The Glenns’ first child, John David, was born in 1946, and their second, Carolyn, in 1947. Glenn served as flight instructor from 1949 to 1951 at Corpus Christi. He attended Amphibious Warfare School in Quantico, Virginia, in 1951–52, and a jet training course before requesting combat in the Korean War. Based primarily at P’ohang, Glenn flew for VMF-311, and, for a time, as an exchange pilot with the Air Force. In his ninety combat missions in Korea from February to September 1953, Glenn piloted F9F Panther jets and F86 Sabre jets (fighter-interceptors), and he shot down three enemy MIGs in the last nine days of the war. Some of his missions were along the Yalu River. Glenn earned two more DFCs and eight more Air Medals for his Korean War service.

Life’s Work

Glenn rose steadily in the ranks, becoming a captain in 1945, a major in 1952, and a colonel in 1959. He became a test pilot in 1954, and on July 16, 1957, as a pilot for Project Bullet, set a record for the first coast-to-coast nonstop supersonic flight in an F8U-1 Crusader jet (Los Angeles to New York). He received his fifth DFC for this event, and the attention he received from the transcontinental flight got him an invitation to be on the television show Name That Tune.

In the following year, Glenn volunteered for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Project Mercury man-in-space program. On April 9, 1959, he was one of seven military test pilots (but the lone Marine) chosen to become the United States’ pioneer astronaut corps, a group that became known to the public as the Mercury Seven. Glenn and his Project Mercury colleagues performed a variety of grueling physical and psychological simulations in preparation for the experience of single-person space flight. Glenn’s technical expertise as a pilot enabled him to aid in the design of the Mercury cockpit and control system. Although he was the oldest of the Mercury astronauts, Glenn initiated a rigorous daily personal training regimen in addition to regular rounds of NASA tests. He visited his family only on weekends. The purpose of Project Mercury was to put astronauts in Earth orbit in short-duration, single-person flights as the preliminary stage toward the anticipated goal of lunar missions and to beat out the Soviet Union in the space race amid a climate of rising Cold War tensions.

Glenn was chosen to pilot the first Mercury orbital flight, originally scheduled for December 20, 1961. The Soviet Vostok program had already placed two cosmonauts in orbit by this time, and NASA, as well as the American public, regarded Project Mercury’s first orbital flight as a means to cut the advantage held by the Soviets since their 1957 launch of the satellite Sputnik. Glenn’s mission, however, had to be canceled ten times over the next two months because of technical problems and inclement weather.

Finally, on February 20, 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. Glenn blasted off into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard his small, bell-shaped capsule, Friendship 7. Glenn’s three orbits, covering 81,000 miles, lasted 4 hours and 56 minutes. His average altitude ranged between 99 and 162 miles. Flying backward, Glenn narrated his visual experiences through the capsule’s small, overhead porthole. He performed a variety of experiments and, with the camera he brought along, also became a pioneer of space photography.

Toward the middle of the mission, Mercury Control’s monitoring panels received a signal indicating that the heat shield on Glenn’s capsule might have come loose from its securing connections. The flight directors feared that Glenn and his capsule might incinerate upon reentry if he jettisoned his retropack (attached to the outside of the heat shield) as planned. Glenn was instructed not to jettison the retropack and to fly the capsule manually during reentry. He saw pieces of the retropack break free and melt from the intense heat, but the heat shield held in place. There was an atmosphere of exceptional tension at Mercury Control during the four-minute-and-twenty-second blackout period.

Glenn splashed down 800 miles southeast of Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean and was picked up by the USS Noa. He was called to the White House, and President John F. Kennedy presented him with a special medal. Glenn was cheered in victory parades by a quarter of a million people in Washington, DC, and by four million people in New York City. While addressing a special joint session of Congress, Glenn made contacts that would serve him well in his future political career. Although he wished to return to space, it was widely believed that NASA passed him by in the Gemini and Apollo programs because he was considered by the administration as too great of a national asset to risk in future missions.

Glenn retired from the Marine Corps in 1965 and served as an executive with Royal Crown International before being elected as a Democrat to the US Senate from Ohio in 1974. Glenn had previously unsuccessfully run for the Senate twice. In 1964, he was injured in a home accident and had to withdraw, and in 1970, he was defeated in the Democratic primary by Howard Metzenbaum. He won in 1974 by beating Republican contender Ralph Park, former mayor of Cleveland. He was reelected in 1980, 1986, and 1992, becoming the first senator from Ohio elected to four terms. In the Senate, Glenn served on the Governmental Affairs Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, the Armed Services Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Special Committee on Aging. In 1978, he coauthored the Nonproliferation Act.

Glenn ran for the presidency in 1984 after the release of a major film based on Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff (1980), an epic about the Mercury program. Glenn, however, lost in the Democratic Party’s primary to former Vice President Walter Mondale. Glenn lent his support to fellow Democrat Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election and appeared live on television with the president in Ohio during Clinton’s journey to the Democratic National Convention in 1996. On the thirty-fifth anniversary of his historic flight (February 20, 1997), Glenn announced that he would retire from the Senate at the end of his fourth term in 1998.

Glenn had been lobbying for a spot on a future space shuttle mission since 1996, and despite some criticism for preferential treatment, NASA announced in January 1998, that he would serve as a payload specialist on an October 1998 flight of the shuttle Discovery (STS-95). The detailed medical records on Glenn from Project Mercury were used as a yardstick to measure metabolic and bone density changes that occurred in zero-gravity conditions. Glenn noted before the mission that such a study was important because the changes that occur in young astronauts in zero-gravity are similar to those experienced by the elderly on Earth.

Glenn’s flight on Discovery lasted for almost nine days, orbited Earth 134 times, and spanned 3.6 million miles. The seven-person international crew included astronauts from Japan and Spain. Glenn provided blood, urine, and saliva samples on the mission for study. The mission also provided Glenn with yet another record—at seventy-seven years old, he became the oldest human ever to undertake space flight.

In addition to performing age-related experiments involving Glenn, the crew deployed a “Spartan” satellite designed to photograph the sun (specifically the solar corona and solar winds), which orbited for two days until the crew retrieved it. They also deployed the Hubble Space Telescope Orbital Systems Test Platform. The experiments for which Glenn was responsible involved the separation and purification of biological materials. During the flight, Glenn exchanged e-mail with President Clinton. Glenn wrote in his memoirs that his shuttle flight at age seventy-seven should serve as evidence that elderly astronauts can “continue to go into space as active mission participants and research subjects.”

On his return, Glenn and his six crew mates were honored with parades in Houston and New York City. He became one of only a few people (including Amelia Earhart) to receive more than one ticker tape parade in New York. Glenn published his memoirs in 1999 and helped found the John Glenn Institute of Public Service and Public Policy at Ohio State University in Columbus. The institute houses Glenn’s archives and artifacts of his career. Glenn’s boyhood home was restored at its original location and became a historic site. Both Glenn and his wife served on the board of trustees of their alma mater, Muskingum College. They lived in Columbus and maintained another home near Washington, DC. In 2010, Glenn received an honorary doctorate from Ohio Northern University. In 2012, Glenn was a part of the ceremonial transfer of Discovery from NASA to the Smithsonian, where it would be permanently displayed. Glenn openly criticized the discontinuation of the shuttle program, saying the grounding the crafts would impede research efforts.

Glenn died on December 8, 2016, after being hospitalized at the James Cancer Hospital of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. He was ninety-five years old. After lying in state at the Ohio Statehouse, he was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

Significance

Glenn’s impressive political and military careers are usually overshadowed by his career as a pioneering astronaut as a member of the Mercury Seven, as the first American to orbit Earth, and as the oldest person to achieve space flight. His February 1962 orbital flight was, without a doubt, a crucial moment in the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union and was therefore also an important political moment in the Cold War confrontation between the two superpowers. At the time, Americans tended to regard Glenn’s flight as a sign that the United States had caught up with the Soviets and would soon take the lead in the space race, fulfilling President Kennedy’s 1961 claim that the United States would put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. Glenn, however, humbly insisted before his mission, “This is a technological problem, not a space race. Our primary concern is not to beat the Russians but to put a man up and bring him back safely.” His February 1962 mission proved that this goal was indeed attainable. Glenn’s October 1998 space flight aboard the shuttle Discovery broke another record: He became the oldest person to fly in space. The mission, however, was not intended simply to boost morale in the space program; the scientific data collected from the mission was employed in studies on aging and zero gravity. With the death of fellow former astronaut Scott Carpenter in October 2013, Glenn became the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven team.

Bibliography

"A Rocket Man at 90." People 20 Feb. 2012: 100–106. Print.

Bell, Joseph N. Seven into Space: The Story of the Mercury Astronauts. London: Ebury, 1960. Print.

Carpenter, M. Scott, et al. We Seven: By the Astronauts Themselves. New York: Simon, 1962. Print.

Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, United States Senate. Project Mercury: Man-in-Space Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Washington, DC.: GPO, 1959. Print.

Glenn, John, and Nick Taylor. John Glenn: A Memoir. New York: Bantam, 1999. Print.

Kluger, Jeffrey. "John Glenn's Friendship 7 Flight." Time 27 Feb. 2012: 17. Print.

Launius, Roger D. Frontiers of Space Exploration. Westport: Greenwood, 2004. Print.

McDougall, Walter A. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic, 1985. Print.

Shepard, Alan, Deke Slayton, Jay Barbree, and Howard Benedict. Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon. Atlanta: Turner, 1994. Print.

Wilford, John Noble. "John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95." The New York Times, 8 Dec. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/john-glenn-dies.html.

Winkler, David F. "Godspeed, John Glenn." Sea Power Feb. 2012: 48. Print.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Bantam, 1980. Print.