On April 8, 1959, Glenn was introduced at a press conference with Scott Carpenter, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., L. Gordon Cooper, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Donald "Deke" Slayton as the country’s Project Mercury astronauts. Glenn, who was the last surviving member of the group, wore a bow tie.
To understand why John Glenn became so important in America, it is important to remember how badly the United States was losing the space race in the early 1960s. The Soviet Union had pulled ahead in this Cold War battle when it launched Sputnik, the first man-made object to be placed into orbit. It then made a mockery of the American program by sending the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Then the Soviets sent a second cosmonaut into orbit.
So all of America was watching at 9:47 in the morning on Feb. 20, 1962. Sitting in the cramped quarters of the Friendship 7 spacecraft, Glenn took off from Cape Canaveral. Scott Carpenter, the backup astronaut for the mission, famously said: “Godspeed, John Glenn.”
Astronaut Glenn climbed into space, circled the globe three times, and then dropped down into the Atlantic Ocean. The flight took all of 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds, but it changed the space race and restored American pride.
President John F. Kennedy watched the news from the Oval Office, and then came out and described Glenn as: “The type of American of whom we are most proud.”
Space travel then held far more unknowns that it does today. For example, "ophthalmologists were literally concerned at that time that your eyes might change shape and your vision might change enough you couldn't even see the instrument panel enough to make an emergency re-entry if you had to," Glenn said during the 2012 celebration of the 50th anniversary of his flight.
"They were enough concerned about it, we actually put a little, miniaturized eye chart at the top of the instrument panel," Glenn said, according to an account of the celebration on Space.com. "And that's still in Friendship 7, up in the Smithsonian (National Air and Space Museum)."
As Glenn prepared to re-enter the atmosphere, mission managers told him that Friendship 7's protective heat shield might have come loose. And if the shield came off, the capsule would almost certainly burn up, killing Glenn.
Strapped to the outside of the spacecraft was a package of small retro-rockets, which were designed to help slow the capsule's re-entry. Glenn was told not to jettison the rockets after firing them, in the hopes that the straps would help hold the heat shield on.
During re-entry, "there were flaming chunks of the retro-pack burning off and coming back by the window," Glenn is quoted as telling Space.com. "I didn't know for sure whether it was the retro-pack or the heat shield, but there wasn't anything I could do about it either way, except just keep trying to work and keep the spacecraft on its actual best attitude coming back in."
When Glenn returned, the nation and the free world celebrated on a historic scale. On Feb. 23, Vice President Lyndon Johnson escorted Glenn back to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Glenn, his family and Johnson then drove back to Cape Canaveral. The streets were lined with people the entire 18 miles. That afternoon, Glenn met with Kennedy who presented him with NASA's Distinguished Service Medal.
Glenn was 40 years old and soon became aware of the widely-held belief that the astronaut was too valuable as an icon to risk in space flight. But his career in public service was only at the halfway point.
In the months after his orbit, Glenn became close with President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, who then was attorney general. They began to urge him to run for office. The Kennedys believed that being a popular astronaut was a great way to garner votes.
Two years after circling the globe, and six weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, Glenn resigned from NASA. The next day, he announced that he was going home to Ohio to be a politician.
Returning made perfect sense. For a man who had circled the globe, nobody ever represented small-town Ohio more than John Glenn.
He was born in 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio, the son of John Sr. and Clara. Two years later, the family moved to New Concord where his father opened a plumbing business. Glenn would later say of his childhood: “A boy could not have had a more idyllic early childhood than I did.”
Glenn’s first flight was in Ohio when he was 8 years old. A barnstorming pilot in an open-cockpit plane took Glenn and his father up for a flight. The future spaceman was never the same.
In 1939, Glenn graduated from New Concord High, which was later named John Glenn High School. It is one of at least five high schools in the country with that name.
Glenn then went to Muskingum College, just down the road from his home. In his sophomore year in college, Glenn had a chance to learn how to fly through the Civilian Pilot Training Program funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The program paid the cost of the flight instructions and gave college credits in physics. Glenn applied, was accepted, and earned his private pilot's license on June 26, 1941.
But the most important thing to ever happen to Glenn in Ohio was meeting Anna Margaret Castor. She was always known as Annie, the daughter of the town dentist. They started dating in high school and were married on April 6, 1943. They had two children, John David Glenn and Carolyn Ann Glenn.
Despite his hometown appeal, his war record, and his status as an iconic astronaut, Glenn’s political career could not have had a worse beginning.
Glenn entered the Democratic primary in Ohio in 1964 for a seat in the U.S. Senate held by Democratic incumbent Stephen M. Young.
Less than a month into the race, a bathroom rug slipped under his feet, and Glenn hit his head against an unforgiving tub. This simple fall proved devastating and he could not campaign. It would take nearly a year to recover.
Glenn dropped out of the race, began to work as a consultant with NASA and as vice president of Royal Crown Cola. Two years later, he was named the president of the company.
In 1970, Glenn ran again, this time for the seat Young was stepping down from at the end of his term. Glenn ran in the primary against Cleveland real estate and parking magnate Howard Metzenbaum, who had the support of the state Democratic party and the unions.
Metzenbaum, who ran Young's successful campaign in 1964 against Glenn, had more money and was better organized. He beat Glenn in a close primary, but then lost in the general election to Republican Robert Taft Jr.
In 1974, Glenn tried to get the Senate seat that opened after William Saxbe resigned his Senate seat after being named President Richard Nixon’s attorney general. But Gov. John Gilligan chose Metzenbaum instead.
Glenn went back to Royal Crown, but his dreams of the Senate survived. He got another shot at Metzenbaum. This time, Metzenbaum made a mistake. In a speech in Toledo, Metzenbaum said Glenn did not deserve Ohio’s vote because he “never worked for a living.”
Glenn won the primary and the general election and would represent Ohio for 24 years. During his time in the Senate, he was chief author of the 1978 Nonproliferation Act, served as chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1987 until 1995, sat on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees and the Special Committee on Aging.
In 1984, Glenn ran for president. But he dropped out when his campaign never gained much traction.
After the presidential bid, Glenn earned some rare bad headlines, for being part of the so-called Keating Five group of senators. The collapse of a large savings and loan in California led by former Cincinnatian Charles H. Keating Jr. cost the FDIC roughly $3 billion in what at the time was the single biggest bank failure in American history.
The senators were accused of improperly intervening with federal regulators on Keating's behalf. A two-year investigation resulted in all of the senators emerging legally unscathed.
However, Glenn would have one more high-profile act of service to his country. This time, he wanted to help and inspire older people.
On Oct. 29, 1998, just months from the end of his time in the Senate, Glenn became the oldest person ever to go into space. He was 77 years old when he finally got his second mission, this time aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Glenn underwent a series of medical tests before, during, and after the flight. NASA scientists tested Glenn's balance and perception, his protein metabolism, and his heart and blood flow. Glenn also wore a harness during many of his nights in space to monitor sleep disorders, another common problem in space travel.
This flight involved 134 orbits of the earth, instead of three trips around he took back in 1962. But he said the same thing to his wife he used to tell her every time he would embark on a dangerous mission in war or in space. “I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum,” Glenn would say. And she responded: “Don’t be long.”
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