John Glenn: NASA, Senate and Oldest in Space

Born in 1921 in Cambridge Ohio, John Glenn fell in love with aviation at an early age, joining the U.S. Marine Corps during World War Two, where he flew 59 Corsair fighter missions in the Pacific Theater of War. He later flew 90 missions in an F-9 Panther during the Korean War, shooting down three MiGs in the last nine days of the war.

Military Test Pilot and Astronaut

After graduating from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in 1954, Glenn flew early test flights of the Vought F-8 Crusader, entering the record books in 1959, when he made the first supersonic transcontinental flight in three hours and 23 minutes.

Selected as one of NASA’s Mercury Seven astronauts during the early days of the Space Race, Glenn served as a backup pilot for Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, who made the first two successful suborbital test flights in the Mercury Space Program.

John Glenn Goes To Space

After weeks of anxious delays, on February 20th, 1962—just 59 years after the Wright Brother’s historic first flight—John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, when he flew his Friendship 7 space capsule to an altitude of 162 miles above the Earth.

Splashing down some five hours and three earth orbits after launch, Glenn’s feat made him a national hero that would follow him for the rest of his life. After retiring from NASA, Ohio voters elected Glenn to the U.S. Senate in 1974, where he served four terms over 24 years, focusing on such causes as nuclear proliferation, wasteful government spending and aging.

Oldest Human in Space

On October 29th, 1998, Glenn returned to space on a nine-day mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery, making him the oldest person to ever fly in space, and while his participation aboard the shuttle was deemed a publicity stunt by many of NASA’s critics, the 77-year-old participated in numerous experiments that studied the aging body’s response to weightlessness.

He passed away on December 8th, 2016, at the tender age of 95, making the life and achievements of John Glenn, one of America’s 20th-century national treasures.