Glenn

Thanks to Kyle for sharing the great collection of articles on a great astronaut and person -- very humble.  I had the honor and privilege of meeting him twice after John's historic Space Shuttle Mission – he was very personable, shook my hands both times, and very nice to autograph a copy of the Time Magazine for my sister in law Barbara where he was featured on the cover page.

 

 

TIME Magazine Cover: John Glenn - Aug. 17, 1998 - John Glenn ...

TIME Magazine Cover: John Glenn. ... John Glenn | Aug. 17, 1998 · Previous Week's Cover · Following Week's Cover · 77-yr old astronaut, Ohio 

 

 

 

From: Herring, Kyle J. (JSC-AD931) 
Sent: Thursday, December 8, 2016 4:38 PM
To: Herring, Kyle J. (JSC-AD931) <kyle.j.herring@nasa.gov>
Subject: NEWS SPECIAL: John Hershel Glenn, Jr. - 1921-2-16

 

NEWS SPECIAL – John Herschel Glenn, Jr.

 

"Zero-G and I feel fine."

- John Glenn, Jr.

 

https://www.nasa.gov/johnglenn

 

 

HEADLINES AND LEDS

 

John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95

 

John Noble Wilford - New York Times (December 8)

 

John Glenn, a freckle-faced son of Ohio who was hailed as a national hero and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth, then became a national political figure for 24 years in the Senate, died on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95. His death was announced on Twitter by Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Mr. Glenn had recently been hospitalized at the James Cancer Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, though university officials said at the time that admission there did not necessarily mean he had cancer. He had heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014 and a stroke around that time.

 

John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95

 

Matt Schudel - Washington Post (December 8)

 

 

John Glenn, who captured the nation's attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was 95. The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Mr. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced.

 

John Glenn dies at 95; hero was first American to orbit Earth

 

Geraldine Baum & Valerie Nelson - Los Angeles Times (December 8()

 

John Glenn, who became an American hero as the first U.S. citizen to orbit Earth and then relived that glory 36 years later as the oldest man to go into space, has died. He was 95. Glenn, who also served for 24 years as a U.S. senator from Ohio, died after being hospitalized in Ohio on Wednesday. Ohio State University President Michael V. Drake confirmed his death, releasing a statement Thursday.

 

John Glenn, first American in orbit, passes away

 

William Harwood - CBS News (December 8)

 

John H. Glenn Jr., a decorated combat veteran and test pilot who gained worldwide fame as the first American to orbit the Earth, went on to become a U.S. senator and, in the autumn of his life, returned to space aboard the shuttle Discovery, has died. He was 95 years old. Glenn had been hospitalized at the Ohio State University James Cancer Center. Details of his illness were not disclosed. Soon after the confirmation of his death, NASA tweeted: "We are saddened by the loss of Sen. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. A true American hero. Godspeed, John Glenn. Ad astra."

 

John Glenn, the 1st American to orbit Earth, has died at 95

 

Seth Borenstein - Associated Press (December 8)

 

John Glenn, whose 1962 flight as the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth made him an all-American hero and propelled him to a long career in the U.S. Senate, died Thursday. The last survivor of the original Mercury 7 astronauts was 95. Glenn died at the James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where he was hospitalized for more than a week, said Hank Wilson, communications director for the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. John Herschel Glenn Jr. had two major career paths that often intersected: flying and politics, and he soared in both of them. Before he gained fame orbiting the world, he was a fighter pilot in two wars, and as a test pilot, he set a transcontinental speed record. He later served 24 years in the Senate from Ohio. A rare setback was a failed 1984 run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

 

Former U.S. astronaut, Senator John Glenn dies in Ohio at 95

 

Will Dunham - Reuters (December 8)

 

John Glenn, who became one of the 20th century's greatest explorers as the first American to orbit Earth and later as the world's oldest astronaut, in addition to a long career as a U.S. senator, died on Thursday at age of 95. Glenn, the last surviving member of the original seven American "Right Stuff" Mercury astronauts, died at the James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State University, said Hank Wilson, a spokesman at the university's John Glenn College of Public Affairs, which Glenn helped found. Glenn was credited with reviving U.S. pride after the Soviet Union's early domination of manned space exploration. His three laps around the world in the Friendship 7 capsule on Feb. 20, 1962, forged a powerful link between the former fighter pilot and the Kennedy-era quest to explore outer space as a "New Frontier."

 

John Glenn, First American To Orbit The Earth, Dies At 95

 

Russell Lewis - National Public Radio (December 8)

 

The first American to orbit the Earth has died. John Glenn was the last surviving member of the original Mercury astronauts. He would later have a long political career as a U.S. senator, but that didn't stop his pioneering ways. Glenn made history a second time in 1998, when he flew aboard the shuttle Discovery to become the oldest person to fly in space. Glenn was 95 when he died; he had been hospitalized in an Ohio State University medical center in Columbus since last week. Glenn had been battling health issues since a stroke a few years ago. His death Thursday was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University.

 

Former senator, astronaut John Glenn dies at 95

 

Tricia Escobedo, Ashley Strickland & John Zarrella - CNN (December 8)

 

John Glenn, a former US senator and the first American to orbit the Earth, died Thursday, according to Ohio State University. He was 95. It was announced Wednesday that Glenn had been hospitalized "more than a week ago," according to Ohio State University spokesman Hank Wilson. He was at The James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State University, but his illness was not disclosed.

 

John Glenn, American hero, aviation icon and former U.S. senator, dies at 95

 

Joe Hallett - Columbus Dispatch (December 8)

 

Former Sen. John Glenn talks via satellite with the astronauts on the International Space Station in February 2012. In the background is a photo of him in 1962 as he prepared to pilot Friendship 7 around the Earth. His legend is other-worldly and now, at age 95, that's where John Glenn has gone. An authentic hero and genuine American icon, Glenn died this afternoon surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus after a remarkably healthy life spent almost from the cradle with Annie, his beloved wife of 73 years, who survives.

 

10 Things to Know About John Glenn, Who Has Died at 95

 

Seth Borenstein - Associated Press

 

Ten notable aspects of the life of astronaut and Senator John H. Glenn Jr. who died Thursday at 95…

__________

 

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95

 

John Noble Wilford - New York Times (December 8)

 

John Glenn, a freckle-faced son of Ohio who was hailed as a national hero and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth, then became a national political figure for 24 years in the Senate, died on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.

 

His death was announced on Twitter by Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.

 

Mr. Glenn had recently been hospitalized at the James Cancer Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, though university officials said at the time that admission there did not necessarily mean he had cancer. He had heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014 and a stroke around that time.

 

He had kept an office on the campus at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, which he helped found, and had a home in Columbus.

 

In just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of Americans whose feats have seized the country's imagination and come to embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh.

 

To the America of the 1960s, Mr. Glenn was a clean-cut, good-natured, well-grounded Midwesterner, raised in Presbyterian rectitude, nurtured in patriotism and tested in war, who stepped forward to risk the unknown and succeeded spectacularly, lifting his country's morale and restoring its self-confidence.

 

It was an anxious nation that watched and listened that February morning, as Mr. Glenn, 40 years old, a Marine Corps test pilot and one of the seven original American astronauts, climbed into Friendship 7, the tiny Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket rising from the concrete flats of Cape Canaveral in Florida.

 

The Cold War had long stoked fears of nuclear destruction, and the Russians seemed to be winning the contest with their unsettling ascent into outer space. Two Russians, Yuri A. Gagarin and Gherman S. Titov, had already orbited Earth the year before, overshadowing the feats of two Americans, Alan B. Shepard and Virgil I. Grissom, who had been launched in separate missions only to the fringes of space.

 

What, people asked with rising urgency, had happened to the United States' vaunted technology and can-do spirit?

Photo 

  

John Glenn with the Friendship 7 in 1962. He was hailed as a national hero and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth. Credit NASA 

 

The answer came at 9:47 a.m. Eastern time, when after weeks of delays the rocket achieved liftoff. It was a short flight, just three orbits. But when Mr. Glenn was safely back, flashing the world a triumphant grin, doubts were replaced by a broad, new faith that the United States could indeed hold its own against the Soviet Union in the Cold War and might someday prevail.

 

No flier since Lindbergh had received such a cheering welcome. Bands played. People cried with relief and joy. Mr. Glenn was invited to the White House by President John F. Kennedy and paraded up Broadway and across the land. A joint meeting of Congress stood and applauded vigorously as Mr. Glenn spoke at the Capitol.

 

In his political history of the space age, "…The Heavens and the Earth," the author Walter A. McDougall described Mr. Glenn's space mission as a "national catharsis unparalleled."

 

"It seemed that he had given Americans back their self-respect," Mr. McDougall added, "and more than that — it seemed Americans dared again to hope."

 

Mr. Glenn was reluctant to talk about himself as a hero. "I figure I'm the same person who grew up in New Concord, Ohio, and went off through the years to participate in a lot of events of importance," he said in an interview years later. "What got a lot of attention, I think, was the tenuous times we thought we were living in back in the Cold War. I don't think it was about me. All this would have happened to anyone who happened to be selected for that flight."

 

Mr. Glenn did not return to space for a long time. Kennedy thought him too valuable as a hero to risk losing in an accident. So Mr. Glenn resigned from the astronaut corps in 1964, became an executive in private industry and entered politics, serving four full terms as a Democratic senator from Ohio and in 1984 running unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination.

 

Finally, 36 years after his Mercury flight, in the last months of his final Senate term, he got his wish for a return to orbit. Despite some criticism that his presence on the mission was a political payoff, a waste of money and of doubtful scientific merit, the hero of yesteryear brought out the crowds again, cheering out of nostalgia and enduring respect as he was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on Oct. 29, 1998. At 77, he became the oldest person to go into space.

Photo 

  

After weeks of delays, Mr. Glenn climbed into Friendship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962, and at 9:47 a.m. Eastern time, the rocket achieved liftoff. Credit NASA 

 

In retirement from the Senate, Mr. Glenn lived with his wife of 73 years, Anna (he always called her Annie), in a suburb of Washington in addition to Columbus. Ohio State University is the repository of papers from his space and political careers.

 

The Making of a Hero

 

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, the only son of a railroad conductor who also owned a plumbing business, and the former Clara Sproat. A few years later, the Glenns moved to New Concord, a small town in southeastern Ohio with a population of little more than 1,000.

 

"It was small but had a lot of patriotic feeling and parades on all the national holidays," Mr. Glenn once said. "Wanting to do something for the country was just natural, growing up in a place like New Concord."

 

Like most everyone else there, the Glenns lived through the hard times of the Depression, instilling in their son a rigid moral code based on their own God-fearing example and saw him through an apple-pie boyhood. He played trumpet, sang in the church choir, washed cars for pocket money and worked as a lifeguard at a summer camp. In high school (now named for him), he was an honor student and lettered in football, basketball and tennis.

 

He still had time to court his high school sweetheart, Anna Margaret Castor, the doctor's daughter. It did not matter that she stammered; she was his girl, and he loved her. They married in April 1943, and he often called her "the real rock of the family." From the time they came to public attention, and throughout the turbulence of spaceflight and politics, John and Anna Glenn each seemed the other's center of gravity.

 

Not until much later did she undergo intensive therapy that virtually cured her stammer, enabling her even to give speeches in public.

Photo 

  

Mr. Glenn with President John F. Kennedy and General Leighton I. Davis during a parade in Cocoa Beach, Fla., after his spaceflight. No flier since Charles Lindbergh had received such a cheering welcome. Credit NASA 

 

Mr. Glenn is survived by his wife; two children, Carolyn Ann Glenn of St. Paul and John David Glenn of Berkeley, Calif.; and two grandsons, Daniel and Zach Glenn.

 

Mr. Glenn began his journey to fame in World War II. In 1939, he enrolled at Muskingum College in his hometown to study chemistry, but he took flying lessons on the side. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he signed up for the Naval Aviation cadet program and after pilot training opted to join the Marines. As a fighter pilot, he flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses and other decorations.

 

Mr. Glenn saw more action in the Korean War, flying 90 combat missions and winning more medals. He put his life on the line again as a military test pilot in the early days of supersonic flight. In 1957, just months before the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik satellite, he made the first transcontinental supersonic flight, piloting an F8U-1 Crusader from Los Angeles to New York in the record time of 3 hours 23 minutes 8.4 seconds.

 

Then, in 1959, newly promoted to lieutenant colonel, he heeded a call for test pilots to apply to be astronauts for the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He and six other pilots were selected in April of that year. (The original Mercury 7 included Mr. Glenn, Mr. Shepard, Mr. Grissom, Walter Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Deke Slayton and Scott Carpenter.)

 

All seven men were eager, competitive and ambitious, but none more so than Mr. Glenn. Tom Miller, a retired Marine general and close friend since they were rookie pilots in World War II, recalled that Mr. Glenn was so determined to be an astronaut that he applied weight to his head to compress his height down to the 5-foot-11-inch maximum for the first astronauts. "He wasn't going to miss a trick," Mr. Miller said. "He'd be sitting down reading with a big bunch of books sitting on his head."

 

But his determination did not win him the assignment to be the first American astronaut to fly. He had to wait out the suborbital flights by Mr. Shepard and Mr. Grissom in 1961 before his turn came.

 

Patience, Then Liftoff

 

In his 1999 memoir, written with Nick Taylor, he admitted he was sorely disappointed when Mr. Shepard was tapped for the first flight. As the oldest and most articulate of the astronauts, Mr. Glenn had attracted a big share of the publicity. He said that he had "worked and studied hard dedicating myself to the program" and that he thought he had a "good shot" at being first. In a letter to a NASA official, Mr. Glenn wrote, "I thought I might have been penalized for speaking out for what I thought was the good of the program."

 

At this time, as Mr. Glenn often recalled, he never anticipated that his orbital flight would be the one that most excited the public, satisfying the nation's hunger for a hero.

 

Tom Wolfe wrote of that time in the best-selling 1979 book "The Right Stuff," a phrase for coolness in the face of danger that has passed into the idiom. He described Mr. Glenn as excessively pious, scolding his fellow astronauts about their after-hours escapades while openly lobbying to be the first of them to fly.

 

"He looked like a balding and slightly tougher version of the cutest-looking freckle-faced country boy you ever saw," Mr. Wolfe wrote. "He had a snub nose, light-hazel eyes, reddish-blond hair and a terrific smile."

Photo 

  

In 1957, just months before the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik satellite, Mr. Glenn made the first transcontinental supersonic flight as a military test pilot, flying an F8U-1 Crusader from Los Angeles to New York in the record time of 3 hours 23 minutes 8.4 seconds. Credit Anthony Camerano/Associated Press 

 

Mr. Glenn said he liked the book but not the 1983 movie based on it, in which he was portrayed by Ed Harris. "Most of his account was reasonably factual, although I was neither the pious saint nor the other guys the hellions he made them into," he told Life magazine in 1998. "Hollywood made a charade out of the story and caricatures out of the people in it."

 

The 1962 space mission came after two months of one postponement after another, sometimes for mechanical problems, often for bad weather. Once Mr. Glenn had to wait six hours, fully suited, in the cramped Friendship 7 capsule before officials called off the launch. But he projected confidence. "You fear the least what you know the most about," he said at the time.

 

On the 11th scheduled time, all was "go," and the rocket lifted off from Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral. The flight stopped the nation in its tracks; people watched on black-and-white television, listened on the radio and prayed.

 

At the end of the first orbit, an automatic control mechanism failed, and Mr. Glenn took over manual control. He would see three sunsets in a brief time. He puzzled for a while about "fireflies" outside his window. NASA later determined that it was his urine and sweat, which was being dumped overboard and turned to frozen crystals glowing in sunlight.

 

A faulty warning light signaled that the capsule heat shield, designed to protect it in the fiery descent back to Earth, had come loose and might come off during re-entry. The signal was erroneous, but no one could be sure. Ground controllers ordered that a retrorocket unit attached under the heat shield by metal straps not be jettisoned after firing in order to give added protection and reduce the risk of premature detachment of the heat shield. This was Mr. Glenn's first real clue that something was amiss.

 

As Friendship 7 plunged through the atmosphere, the astronaut's recorded heartbeat raced as one of the metal straps came loose and banged on the side of the capsule.

 

"Right away, I could see flaming chunks flying by the window, and I thought the heat shield might be falling apart," he wrote after the flight. "This was a bad moment. But I knew that if that was really happening, it would all be over shortly, and there was nothing I could do about it."

 

The capsule splashed down in the Atlantic off the Bahamas, where a Navy destroyer was waiting. Mr. Glenn radioed, "My condition is good, but that was a real fireball, boy."

 

In the flush of fame, Mr. Glenn toured the country publicizing the space program, visiting aerospace plants and waving to cheering crowds and signing autographs. But he always had his eye on another flight into space.

 

He kept asking NASA officials about a new flight assignment and was routinely stonewalled. Not yet, they said. Kennedy's reservations about risking a hero's life were disclosed years later.

 

Frustrated, Mr. Glenn resigned from NASA in early 1964. But an idea for a new career had been planted in his mind.

Photo 

  

Mr. Glenn with his wife, Anna (he called her Annie), in New Concord, Ohio, as he announced his intention to run for the presidency in 1983. Credit D. Gorton/The New York Times 

 

To the Senate, and Beyond

 

One night in December 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited the Glenns to dinner at his home in McLean, Va. In the course of the evening, the attorney general suggested that Mr. Glenn run for public office. With the backing of a powerful Kennedy, he might have a good chance at a Senate seat from Ohio in the 1964 election.

 

Mr. Glenn's parents happened to be among the few Democrats in New Concord, and Mr. Glenn once recalled that he had developed an abiding interest in political affairs from his high school civics teacher, Harford Steele.

 

Mr. Glenn eventually took the advice, but had to quit the race after being seriously injured in a bathroom fall. He spent the next decade working as an executive of the Royal Crown Cola Company. He still had the space itch, though, and inquired about a possible place on one of the Apollo missions to the moon, but NASA gave him no encouragement.

 

"Yeah, I would have liked to go to the moon," he said in later years. "But I didn't want to stick around being the oldest astronaut in training just hoping to go to the moon. So I went on to other things, and that was a decision I lived with."

 

In 1970, Mr. Glenn ran again for the Senate, but lost in the Democratic primary to Howard M. Metzenbaum. Four years later, Mr. Glenn won the primary and breezed to victory in the general election, beginning a 24-year career in the Senate.

 

Over the years, Mr. Glenn earned the respect of Senate colleagues as an upright, candid and diligent legislator. Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, described Mr. Glenn as a "workhorse" who was especially well informed and a forceful voice on defense issues. "When he speaks, you know he's speaking on a subject of which he has a command and a reason for speaking," Mr. Graham said shortly before Mr. Glenn's return to space.

 

As a senator, Mr. Glenn developed an expertise in weapons systems, nuclear proliferation issues and most legislation related to technology and bureaucratic reform. He generally took moderate positions on most issues, though in his last two terms his voting record became more liberal. He was an enthusiastic supporter of President Bill Clinton.

 

The senator drew admiring audiences in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, but his wooden speaking style and lack of a cogent campaign message were blamed for his poor showing at the polls. After losses in several states, he dropped out of the race, which former Vice President Walter F. Mondale won before President Ronald Reagan overwhelmed him in the general election.

 

The one blemish on Mr. Glenn's squeaky-clean political reputation came in the 1980s, when he was one of five senators present at a meeting with federal regulators concerning accusations of savings and loan association fraud against Charles H. Keating Jr., a former Ohioan. The meeting smacked of impropriety and political pressure. Because Mr. Glenn had no further contact with Mr. Keating, who eventually was sent to prison, the Senate decided that he did nothing deserving discipline.

 

As a member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, Mr. Glenn developed the medical rationale used in arguing his case for a return flight in space. He offered himself as a human guinea pig in tests of the physiological effects of space weightlessness, like bone-mass loss and cardiovascular, muscular and immune system changes, and how they seem to be comparable to the usual effects of aging.

 

Mr. Glenn's return to space in 1998 drew criticism. But the new-old astronaut was not to be denied, and his heroic image, and reawakened memories of the early space age, attracted launching crowds on a scale not seen since astronauts were flying to the moon.

 

Still healthy and vigorous, though not as agile as in 1962, Mr. Glenn embarked on his second venture in space, as he said in an interview, to show the world that the lives of older people need not be dictated by the calendar.

Photo 

 

In 1998, 36 years after his Mercury flight, Mr. Glenn got his wish for a return to orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery. At 77, he became the oldest person to go into space. Credit NASA 

 

A Flier Almost to the End

 

In recent years, honors continued to come his way: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland was renamed the John H. Glenn Research Center.

 

In 2012, about a week before the 50th anniversary of the Friendship 7 flight, a reporter found the 90-year-old Mr. Glenn in full voice and clear mind, but regretting that he had sold his airplane the month before. Their aging knees had made it difficult for him and his wife to climb on the wing to get into the cabin of their twin-engine Beechcraft Baron. For years they had flown it on vacations and back and forth to Washington. Though his airplane was gone, Mr. Glenn was pleased to say several times that he still had a valid pilot's license.

 

Mr. Glenn was a flier, almost to the end.

 

In one of the interviews at this time, he was reminded that Mr. Wolfe, the author, had recently judged him "the last true national hero America has ever had."

 

Mr. Glenn gave another of his dismissive aw-shucks responses: "I don't think of myself that way," he said. "I get up each day and have the same problems others have at my age. As for as trying to analyze all the attention I received, I will leave that to others."

 

John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95

 

Matt Schudel - Washington Post (December 8)

 

 

John Glenn, who captured the nation's attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was 95.

 

The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Mr. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced. 

 

Mr. Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA's Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country's military and technological might at the height of the Cold War. He was not the first American in space — two of his fellow astronauts preceded him — but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the globe captured the imagination of his countrymen like few events before or since. Mr. Glenn was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven.

 

"John always had the right stuff," President Obama said in a statement, adding that Mr. Glenn "reminded us that with courage and a spirit of discovery there's no limit to the heights we can reach together."

 

In an era when fear of encroaching Soviet influence reached from the White House to kindergarten classrooms, Mr. Glenn, in his silver astronaut suit, lifted the hopes of a nation on his shining shoulders. When he emerged smiling from his Friendship 7 capsule after returning from space, cheers echoed throughout the land.

 

"You had to have been alive at that time to comprehend the reaction of the nation, practically all of it," author Tom Wolfe, who coined the phrase "the right stuff" to describe Mr. Glenn and the other Mercury astronauts, wrote in a 2009 essay. "John Glenn, in 1962, was the last true national hero America has ever had."

 

After he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1974, Mr. Glenn served on Capitol Hill for 24 years and made a halfhearted run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. When he was 77 and completing his fourth Senate term in 1998, he had one final flight of glory, returning to space as a crew member aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

 

As heroes go, the freckle-faced Mr. Glenn appeared unassuming and seemed to embody the middle-American values of modesty, steadiness and hard work.

 

He had climbed the ranks of the Marine Corps, becoming a full colonel, by accepting the most dangerous assignments and never flinching under pressure. He flew 149 combat missions in two wars and was a test pilot in the 1950s, when faster-than-sound airplanes often veered out of control and crashed in smoking heaps.

 

When he joined the astronaut corps in 1959, no one knew whether a human being could survive the ordeals of space travel. Yet for all the risks he faced, Mr. Glenn was a man of careful preparation and quiet responsibility.

 

'Godspeed, John Glenn'

 

On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union made a bold advance on the Cold War chessboard by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. In response, the U.S. government formed NASA in 1958 amid widespread fear that the country was falling behind the Soviets in technology and military strength.

 

Of the seven original astronauts of the Mercury program — the others were M. Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Walter M. "Wally" Schirra Jr., Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Donald K. "Deke" Slayton — Mr. Glenn was the oldest and the lone Marine. A lieutenant colonel at the time, he also had the highest rank and the most combat experience.

 

He did not drink, smoke or swear and maintained a disciplined, straight-arrow manner while training in Cocoa Beach, Fla., near NASA's space center at Cape Canaveral. Comfortable in front of cameras — which followed the astronauts everywhere after they signed a $500,000 deal with Life magazine for a series of exclusive stories — Mr. Glenn was in many ways the public face of NASA.

 

Privately, however, there was friction among the "Magnificent Seven," as the Mercury astronauts were dubbed in the news media. Concerned that some of his colleagues' dalliances with women could lead to bad publicity and jeopardize the manned space program, Mr. Glenn confronted his fellow astronauts, admonishing them to avoid any semblance of wrongdoing.

 

"There was no doubt whatsoever that Glenn meant every word of it," Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book, "The Right Stuff." "When he got his back up, he was formidable. He was not to be trifled with."

 

Not all of the astronauts were pleased with Mr. Glenn's righteousness, however, and Shepard told him to mind his own business.

 

"His moralizing led to colorful and heated exchanges among the pilots, and it wasn't pleasant banter," Shepard and Slayton wrote in their 1995 book, "Moon Shot."

 

When the astronauts voted among themselves to confer the honor of being the first American in space, they chose Shepard.

 

On May 5, 1961, Shepard had a 15-minute suborbital space flight, followed two months later by Grissom on a similar mission. But two Soviet cosmonauts had already circled the Earth by August 1961.

 

Mr. Glenn's turn came on Feb. 20, 1962. After 11 delays because of bad weather or faulty equipment, he sat in his tiny space capsule, the Friendship 7, atop an MA-6 rocket that had failed in 40 percent of its test flights.

 

After liftoff at 9:47 a.m., backup pilot Carpenter said on national television, "Godspeed, John Glenn."

 

The moment was shared by practically the entire nation, as a television audience of 135 million — the largest up to that time — witnessed the launch.

 

The flight plan called for seven orbits, but after the first, the capsule began to wobble. Mr. Glenn overrode the automatic navigation system and piloted Friendship 7 with manual controls for two more orbits, reaching a height of 162 miles above the Earth's surface.

 

Midway through the flight, a warning light indicated that the heat shield, which would protect the capsule during its reentry into Earth's atmosphere, may have come loose. Without a heat shield, it was possible that Mr. Glenn could burn up inside the capsule as it raced back from space.

 

As Friendship 7 was descending, all radio contact was lost. Shepard, acting as "capsule communicator" from Cape Canaveral, tried to reach Mr. Glenn in his spacecraft, saying, "How do you read? Over."

 

After about 4 minutes and 20 seconds of silence, Mr. Glenn could finally be heard: "Loud and clear. How me?"

 

"How are you doing?" Shepard asked.

 

"Oh, pretty good," Mr. Glenn casually responded, later adding, "but that was a real fireball, boy."

 

Exterior pieces of the capsule's had broken off during reentry and burst into flame. A defective warning light caused much of the panic, but during those four tense minutes, it was feared that Mr. Glenn had been lost — along with the promise of the space program.

 

When he splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean after 4 hours 56 minutes aloft, Mr. Glenn emerged as an almost mythic figure who had scaled heights no American had reached before.

 

"I was fully aware of the danger," he said in 1968. "No matter what preparation you make, there comes the moment of truth. You're playing with big stakes — your life. But the important thing to me wasn't fear but what you can do to control it."

 

He was greeted upon his return by President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. After an estimated 1 million spectators crowded the streets of Washington, Mr. Glenn insisted that the other six Mercury astronauts join him for a parade before 4 million people in New York.

 

"During his ticker-tape parade up Broadway," Wolfe wrote, "you have never heard such cheers or seen so many thousands of people crying."

 

From pilot to politics

 

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, and grew up in New Concord, Ohio. His father ran a plumbing supply business and later had a Chevrolet dealership. His mother taught at an elementary school.

 

Mr. Glenn was an honor student in high school, lettered in three sports and played trumpet in the band. At Muskingum College in New Concord, he was a reserve center on the football team.

 

He took flying lessons in his teens and left college early in 1942 to enter a Navy pilot training program before transferring to the aviation branch of the Marine Corps. On April 6, 1943, he married Anna "Annie" Castor, whom he had known since childhood.

 

During World War II, Mr. Glenn flew 59 missions as a fighter pilot and took part in the Marshall Islands campaign in the Pacific. He was stationed on Guam in the Western Pacific and was a flight instructor in Texas before returning to action in the Korean War.

 

He was in the same squadron in Korea as baseball star Ted Williams and flew 90 missions as a jet fighter pilot. He once returned with more than 200 holes shot through the fuselage and wings of his plane.

 

Attached to an Air Force unit, Mr. Glenn shot down three Soviet-made MiGs during the final nine days of the war in 1953, leading his crew to paint "MiG Mad Marine" on the side of his F-86 Sabre jet.

 

After Korea, Mr. Glenn was a test pilot at the naval air station at Patuxent River, Md., and set a transcontinental speed record on July 16, 1957, by flying an F8U-1 Crusader jet coast to coast in 3 hours 23 minutes.

 

He worked at the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics and eventually was awarded a bachelor's degree by Muskingum. He also found time in 1957 to appear on the game show "Name That Tune" with child actor Eddie Hodges. They split $25,000 in prize money, which was more than Mr. Glenn's annual pay as a test pilot.

 

When NASA began recruiting a team of astronauts, it sought skilled pilots who could withstand rigorous physical and psychological testing and who — to fit into cramped space capsules — were shorter than 5 feet 11 inches tall. (Mr. Glenn was 5-foot-10 1 / 2.)

 

With their courage and know-how, the Mercury astronauts embodied the spirit of the "New Frontier" espoused by Kennedy, and Mr. Glenn became friends with the youthful president and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general.

 

Encouraged by the Kennedy family, Mr. Glenn resigned from the astronaut corps in 1964 to run for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. He dropped out after slipping on a rug and striking his head on a bathtub, resulting in inner-ear problems that required extensive medical treatment. In 1965, he retired from the Marine Corps, having received six Distinguished Flying Crosses and 19 Air Medals.

 

He then became an executive with Royal Crown Cola, invested in real estate and worked with a management company that operated Holiday Inns, particularly around Orlando. Within a few years, he was a millionaire.

 

Mr. Glenn stayed close to the Kennedys and was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. He accompanied five of Kennedy's 10 children (an 11th was born after his death) back to their home in McLean, Va. The next morning, Mr. Glenn informed the other children that their father had been killed.

 

"When Bob died, I had to sit on the edge of the bed as each child was waking up and tell them their dad was not coming home," Mr. Glenn told a Muskingum audience in 1997. "It was one of the hardest things I ever did."

 

He was a pallbearer at Robert Kennedy's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery and handed the flag from the coffin to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). Soon afterward, Mr. Glenn helped organize a group that successfully lobbied for passage of a national gun control act in 1968.

 

'I have held a job, Howard'

 

Making a second bid for the Senate in 1970, Mr. Glenn called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, but he lost the Democratic primary in Ohio to businessman Howard M. Metzenbaum. Then-Rep. Robert Taft Jr., a Republican, won the general election.

 

Early in 1974, Metzenbaum was appointed to the Senate to fill the expiring term of William B. Saxbe, who resigned to become U.S. attorney general. When Metzenbaum ran for a full Senate term that year, Mr. Glenn challenged him again in the primary.

 

At a time when the military was unpopular, Metzenbaum repeatedly called Mr. Glenn "colonel" and questioned his ability as a leader, saying he had never "met a payroll." The comment was widely seen as an insult, insinuating that Mr. Glenn had never held a "real" job.

 

In a debate with Metzenbaum, the retired Marine flashed the steel beneath his benign Midwestern smile.

 

"I served 23 years in the United States Marine Corps," Mr. Glenn said. "I was through two wars. I flew 149 missions. My plane was hit by antiaircraft fire on 12 different occasions.

 

"I was in the space program. It wasn't my checkbook, it was my life that was on the line. .?.?. I ask you to go with me . . . to a veterans hospital, and look those men with their mangled bodies in the eye and tell them they didn't hold a job.

 

"You go with me to any Gold Star mother, and you look her in the eye and tell her that her son did not hold a job.

 

".?.?. Stand in Arlington National Cemetery — where I have more friends than I like to remember — and you watch those waving flags . . . and you tell me that those people didn't have a job.

 

"I tell you, Howard Metzenbaum, you should be on your knees every day of your life thanking God that there were some men — some men — who held a job. . . . And their self-sacrifice is what has made this country possible.

 

"I have held a job, Howard."

 

The powerful "Gold Star Mother" speech, recognizing families that had lost children in foreign wars, quickly turned the polls in Mr. Glenn's favor. He defeated Metzenbaum in the primary and then easily won the November general election, sweeping all of Ohio's 88 counties. Reelected in 1980, 1986 and 1992, Mr. Glenn was the first senator from Ohio to win four consecutive elections.

 

A senator in space

 

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Glenn was a strong supporter of the military and an authority on intelligence issues. He supported a woman's right to abortion and was an advocate of campaign finance reform, national health insurance and medical research.

 

He sponsored bills to improve the safety of nursing homes, reduce government paperwork and limit nuclear proliferation. As chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee from 1988 to 1994, he helped create the Department of Veterans Affairs.

 

In the late 1980s, Mr. Glenn's political action committee accepted a contribution from financier Charles H. Keating Jr., who was at the center of a nationwide savings-and-loan scandal. The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that Mr. Glenn "exercised poor judgment," but he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

 

He made a run for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination but proved to be an awkward campaigner and quit the race early, saying, "I humiliated my family, gained 16 pounds and went millions of dollars into debt."

 

On Feb. 20, 1997, the 35th anniversary of his spaceflight, Mr. Glenn announced that he would not run for reelection in 1998. He established a public policy institute at Ohio State University and wrote his memoirs. In 2012, Mr. Glenn was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

 

In addition to his wife, of Columbus and Bethesda, Md., survivors include two children, J. David Glenn of Berkeley, Calif., and Carolyn "Lyn" Glenn of St. Paul, Minn.; and two grandsons.

 

Revered for his heroism as an astronaut, Mr. Glenn remained close to the space program long after leaving NASA. In 1986, immediately after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, he made a little-publicized trip to Cape Canaveral to comfort the families of astronauts killed in the disaster.

 

Every year, he sent the results of his physical exams to NASA, just in case. At 75, he could still do 75 push-ups. In 1996, he set a flying record by piloting a twin-engine plane from Dayton, Ohio, to Washington in 1 hour, 36 minutes.

 

When Mr. Glenn was named to the crew of the space shuttle Discovery, skeptics said NASA was awarding him a vanity flight to make him, at 77, the oldest person ever to go into space. During the nine-day mission in 1998, Mr. Glenn helped film the flight and took part in experiments on aging. He made one of his final public appearances in June 2016, when the Columbus airport was renamed in his honor.

 

His return to space was a reminder of what he had accomplished more than three decades earlier, when he soared into the heavens and gave renewed hope to a grateful nation.

 

"People are afraid of the future, of the unknown," he said in 1962. "If a man faces up to it and takes the dare of the future, he can have some control over his destiny."

 

John Glenn dies at 95; hero was first American to orbit Earth

 

Geraldine Baum & Valerie Nelson - Los Angeles Times (December 8()

 

John Glenn, who became an American hero as the first U.S. citizen to orbit Earth and then relived that glory 36 years later as the oldest man to go into space, has died. He was 95.

 

Glenn, who also served for 24 years as a U.S. senator from Ohio, died after being hospitalized in Ohio on Wednesday.

 

Ohio State University President Michael V. Drake confirmed his death, releasing a statement Thursday.

 

"The Ohio State University community deeply mourns the loss of John Glenn, Ohio's consummate public servant and a true American hero. He leaves an undiminished legacy as one of the great people of our time," he wrote.

 

In his first historic flight, Glenn circled Earth for nearly five hours in a tiny spaceship on Feb. 20, 1962. To return to space on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1998, he had sold himself as a human guinea pig who — at 77 — would demonstrate the effects of space travel on the elderly.

 

The second celebrated trip did nearly as much to revive interest in America's space program as his first pioneering voyage had to ignite the country's fascination in space exploration.

 

Glenn first earned broad public attention in 1962 in the bell-shaped space capsule Friendship 7 — a flight that NASA's mission control worried might burn up upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Epitomizing the fighter-jock pilot of few words mythologized in Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff", Glenn exited the capsule smiling and jauntily walked across the awaiting aircraft carrier deck as if he had just returned from a cross-town errand.

 

Glenn was the last surviving astronaut of the original Mercury 7 group. The others were Alan B. Shepard Jr., Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Deke Slayton and Scott Carpenter.

 

A war hero and test pilot who earned fame even before he was named to the Mercury team, Glenn seemed to have the right stuff and more.

 

Not only did Glenn "have courage and ambition, but he also had supreme confidence in himself and his own abilities," qualities that distinguished him from most mortals, said Frank Van Riper, who wrote the 1983 biography "Glenn: The Astronaut Who Would be President."

 

"That type of confidence can let him sit atop a rocket and have his blood pressure not change at all."

 

After his first space flight, Glenn, then 40, was elevated to celebrity status as much by his personal charm and heroics as he was by the pioneering era that he helped define. Before Glenn made his three loops around Earth in a four-hour, 56-minute flight, only Soviet astronauts, test dummies and dogs had made historic "firsts" in space. Almost a year before Glenn defied gravity, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space.

 

Glenn was neither the first or second American in space. Those distinctions belonged to Shepard, whose entire voyage lasted 15 minutes and who was followed months later by Grissom. Yet Glenn's flight raised the most passion and publicity in America. Glenn stayed aloft for hours, focusing Americans' rapt attention on his every orbit and ultimately restoring America's confidence in its technological prowess.

 

President Kennedy was apparently so relieved that Glenn helped put America back in the space race, and so concerned about the astronaut's well-being, that he vetoed a return to space by Glenn. Rather, Kennedy marked Glenn as an American with a political future. After a few early political defeats, the astronaut was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1974.

 

Although Glenn remained a supporter of NASA, he tried to steer clear of being seen as the Senate "astronaut," preferring to make his mark in other areas. He was perhaps best known as the author of bills to restrict the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. He also helped pass legislation to clean up radioactive waste at the nation's nuclear weapons sites.

 

Yet his drive to return to space never fully abated, and he relentlessly lobbied the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for another space flight. Glenn insisted that he was not driven to return to space for the thrill of the ride or as a passenger with a congressional free pass but as a scientist-explorer.

 

 

"What you're up there for," he said, "is to accomplish something for the country that may break us into some new areas of research that may benefit an awful lot of people."

 

After his late-in-life flight, dozens of tests done on his body showed that he handled the rigors of space as well as astronauts roughly half his age, NASA scientists said when results were released in 2000.

 

In 2012, Glenn and Carpenter received a hero's welcome when they returned to the Cape Canaveral launchpad to mark the 50th anniversary of Glenn's orbital flight.

 

The national attention after the 1962 flight was "almost unbelievable," Glenn said at the event, and added that he and his colleagues learned to live with the acclaim "or tried to anyway."

 

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio. His mother, Clara, a teacher, and father, John, soon moved to the tiny town of New Concord, where his father opened a plumbing business. At 3, he met Anna "Annie" Castor, the 4-year-old daughter of the town dentist. The pair started dating in high school and married in 1944.

 

In high school, Glenn was an honors student who excelled in sports and student politics — and played the lead in the senior class play.

 

A religious young man, Glenn enrolled in Muskingum College, a small Presbyterian school in New Concord, where he sang in the church choir and played football. While there, Glenn learned to fly through a civilian program run by the Navy.

 

When it came time to enlist, he joined the Marines, leaving college behind after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

 

 

During World War II, he rose to the rank of captain and decided to make a career in the military. By the end of the war, he had flown 59 missions with F-4U fighters, and was awarded two Distinguished Flying Crosses and 10 Air Medals.

 

The Korean War meant 90 more missions for the Marine aviator, and many more medals, including a third and fourth Distinguished Flying Cross.

 

"Glenn grew up with the archetypal Protestant work ethic and the idea that good things happen to people who work hard," Van Riper said. "Add to this sense of confidence and the idea in the military that you succeed if you work hard, and it explains why he pursued tougher and tougher assignments."

 

As a test pilot, Glenn pushed his bosses to let him attempt a transcontinental flight in an F8U-1 Crusader fighter aircraft. On July 16, 1957, he set a speed record of 3 hours 23 minutes and 8.4 seconds flying from Los Angeles to New York, picking up a fifth Distinguished Flying Cross and a taste for fame.

 

Two years later, Glenn volunteered for an elite corps of pilots who would become the country's first astronauts, riding rockets into space. NASA pared an original list of about 500 test pilots down to 110 and then to the Mercury Seven.

 

Training was rigorous and tedious. In addition to studying astrophysics and biology, the new astronauts were exposed to high heat, strong forces of gravity and the sense of weightlessness. Glenn became a pacesetter in training and moral leadership. He would run extra miles in a morning workout and lecture the others against carousing.

 

When Glenn took his pioneering turn in space, astronaut Carpenter spoke for all Americans when he radioed from launch control just before liftoff, "Godspeed, John Glenn." Carpenter later said he had tried to keep the mood light by playfully telling Glenn: "Remember, John, this was built by the low bidder."

 

NASA cut the flight short — Glenn was supposed to orbit Earth seven times — when mechanical failure created concern that Friendship 7's heat shield might fall off during re-entry and cause the capsule to burn up.

 

Although he remained calm, Glenn later told Life magazine that he had been prepared to die. The heat shield held. After Glenn's safe return, he became a national hero. Bathed in the spotlight, Glenn was typically low key.

 

"It's been a long day," he said after being fished out of the Atlantic Ocean by helicopter, "but it has been very interesting."

 

Back on Earth, Glenn was greeted by Kennedy; 4 million New Yorkers showered him and his family with ticker tape; and the New York Times called him "America's first flesh-and-blood Buck Rogers."

 

Reflecting on that moment decades later while sitting in his third-floor office at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, Glenn was at a loss to explain the adulation: "It's true we got more attention. It wasn't something we planned. Truth is, I just don't know why it happened."

 

After his ambition to fly again was scratched, Glenn retired from the military in 1965 and entered private business, serving first as vice president of corporate planning and then as president of the Royal Crown Cola Co. He also made a fortune with business investments that included building Holiday Inns in Florida.

 

But within a few years, he decided to try politics. After losing the 1970 Democratic primary in Ohio for a U.S. Senate seat to Howard Metzenbaum, Glenn ran against him again in 1974.

 

During the campaign, Metzenbaum contrasted his business background with Glenn's military and astronaut credentials, saying his opponent had "never worked for a living."

 

Glenn's reply came to be known as the "Gold Star Mothers" speech. He challenged Metzenbaum to tell wounded veterans "they didn't hold a job" and tell any Gold Star mother — women with a child who died while serving in the military — that "her son did not hold a job."

 

Glenn won the nomination and the general election.

 

Jimmy Carter considered making Glenn his running mate in the 1976 presidential race but after Glenn gave an uninspired address to the Democratic National Convention, Carter chose Walter Mondale. A decade later, Glenn ran for president and racked up $3 million in debt but didn't make it out of the primaries.

 

"He was never really a coalition builder," Van Riper said.

 

And if he was considered a bit of a square by the other Mercury astronauts, that image intensified in the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1999. His relationships with others on Capitol Hill was always cordial if not distant. But in Glenn's post-Watergate class of 1974, he was always a respected colleague, considered a sincerely decent man.

 

His Norman Rockwell character and reputation for unparalleled principle were severely tested in 1989 during the so-called Keating Five scandal. He was one of five senators investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee for using clout to keep federal regulators out of the way of savings-and-loan mogul Charles Keating Jr. The committee said Glenn used "poor judgment" in accepting a $200,000 donation from Keating but cleared the senator of wrongdoing.

 

Through all the years after his famous flight in space, Glenn continued flying. Almost every weekend he would escape Washington for Ohio in his Beechcraft Baron, with his wife as his co-pilot. When he sold his plane in early 2012, Glenn noted that he still held a valid pilot's license.

 

In 1995, he had started campaigning to return to space. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Aging, he had learned that the aging process on Earth, in many ways, is similar to the effects of weightlessness, and he decided he wanted to know why. Glenn approached NASA chief Dan Goldin and pressed to serve as a crew member on a Discovery flight as a test subject for geriatric experiments.

 

Goldin gave the go-ahead after aging experts insisted that Glenn's mission might produce good science and NASA's own doctors found Glenn in good health.

 

He had kept fit throughout the decades, running in his youth and power-walking in his later years around his Bethesda, Md., neighborhood. He lifted weights, ate well, took vitamins and kept trim.

 

The day after returning to Earth on the space shuttle, Glenn admitted he had felt "a little woozy" upon landing but relayed a message aimed at other senior citizens. "Old folks have ambitions and dreams too, like everyone else. ... Why don't they go for them? Don't sit on a couch someplace," he said.

 

But age did catch up. Glenn sold off his airplanes and stopped flying in 2013 and then last year, he gave up driving too. Though his eyesight was failing, Glenn was still consumed with tracking current events — Islamic State, the Iranian nuclear arms deal and the deep spending cuts to the nation's space program, which he believed to be a crucial misstep.

 

His return to space was, in a way, Glenn's attempt at writing his own epitaph.

 

"Going back up there was a nice capstone to a career that was always centered on that 1962 flight," Van Riper said. "He's going to be remembered as the last American hero."

 

Glenn, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, is survived by his wife, Annie; two children, David and Carolyn Ann, and two grandchildren.

 

John Glenn, first American in orbit, passes away

 

William Harwood - CBS News (December 8)

 

John H. Glenn Jr., a decorated combat veteran and test pilot who gained worldwide fame as the first American to orbit the Earth, went on to become a U.S. senator and, in the autumn of his life, returned to space aboard the shuttle Discovery, has died. He was 95 years old.  

 

Glenn had been hospitalized at the Ohio State University James Cancer Center. Details of his illness were not disclosed.

 

Soon after the confirmation of his death, NASA tweeted: "We are saddened by the loss of Sen. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. A true American hero. Godspeed, John Glenn. Ad astra."

 

In an age when the word "hero" has become commonplace, Glenn was hesitant to apply the term to himself. But by any standard, he stood as the personification of the word to millions of Americans who lived through the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.

 

"I think people need heroes," Glenn told CBS News in a 2012 interview. "I don't know whether I am one or not ... but if we can help encourage some of the young people of today in ... their education and technical matters also, it's well worth the effort."

 

The battle for the high frontier began Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. Within two weeks, writes Tom Wolfe in "The Right Stuff," a "colossal panic was underway" in the United States.

 

"Sputnik 1 had become the second momentous event of the Cold War," Wolfe  wrote in his 1979 bestseller. "The first had been the Soviet development of the atomic bomb in 1953. From a purely strategic standpoint, the fact that the Soviets had the rocket power to launch Sputnik 1 meant they now also had the capacity to deliver the bomb on an intercontinental ballistic missile. The panic reached far beyond the relatively sane concern for tactical weaponry, however. Sputnik 1 took on a magical dimension. ... Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake."

 

Glenn agreed, saying later that "people today tend too much to forget what it was like back in those days. They don't remember the national psyche back then. It was communism versus our form of government, and the Soviets at that time were saying that they were now superior to us in technology and research."

 

Extremely competitive, in top-notch physical shape and with a charismatic persona, Glenn fit the astronaut-hero image and many believed he would be the first American in space. He wasn't. He followed Alan Shepard and Virgil "Gus" Grissom who both made short up-and-down suborbital test flights aboard relatively modest Redstone rockets.

 

But in the end, Glenn achieved the greatest fame when he rode a more powerful Atlas rocket to became the first American in orbit, restoring national pride in the wake of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's pioneering orbital flight a year earlier. Glenn's fame and popularity were so widespread that President Kennedy reportedly ordered NASA managers not to let him fly in space again for fear America's iconic spaceman might be lost in an accident.

 

But decades later, in 1998, he would reprise his role as astronaut-hero with an unprecedented return to space at the age of 77.

 

Rise of a NASA legend

 

John Hershel Glenn was born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio. He earned a bachelor of science degree in engineering from Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, and was commissioned in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1943. Flying F-4U fighters, Glenn completed 59 combat missions in the Pacific theater of operations during World War 2.

 

He flew another 90 combat missions during the Korean War, including 27 at the controls of F-86 Sabrejet fighters as an Air Force exchange pilot. During the last nine days of the conflict, he shot down three Russian-built MiG jets during intense dogfights along the Yalu River.

 

After a post-war stint patrolling the North China Sea, Glenn attended the U.S. Navy's test pilot school at Patuxent River, Maryland, helping evaluate a variety of high performance aircraft. In July 1957, while serving as a project officer for the F8U Crusader jet, he set a transcontinental speed record, flying from Los Angeles to New York in three hours and 23 minutes.

 

Three months later, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, and the superpower space race began.

 

At Edwards Air Force Base in California, highly skilled test pilots already were flying to the very edge of space in X-15 rocketplanes. An upgraded orbital version, a true spacecraft that would be launched by a powerful Titan rocket and land on a runway, was on the drawing board.

 

But the Cold War panic sweeping America left no time for such methodical, long-range planning. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Space Act, creating an open, civilian space agency - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - to explore the new frontier. And the first item on the agenda was to put a human being into space as soon as possible.

 

The Mercury Seven

 

The result was Project Mercury. Instead of a winged spacecraft like the planned X-15B or X-20, NASA opted for a tiny one-person capsule that could be launched by existing Redstone and Atlas rockets. The human passenger -- no one thought of him or her as a pilot -- would serve as a medical test subject and observer. Just about any reasonably healthy, reasonably intelligent person would suffice.

 

But to eliminate the prospect of civilian daredevils in space, Eisenhower ordered NASA to select the initial Mercury astronauts from the existing pool of 540 military test pilots. The candidates had to be no older than 39, no taller than five feet 11 inches and have at least 1,500 hours flying time in jet aircraft.

 

"They wanted people who had done as much high-speed flying as possible, supersonic speed if possible, combat time, all of these things," Glenn said. "In other words, they wanted people who had worked through emergencies and had come through OK."

 

From the 110 men who met the basic criteria, NASA ultimately chose seven based on the results of an exhausting battery of physiological and psychological tests.

 

In April 1959, the Mercury Seven were introduced at a crowded news conference: Alan Shepard, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Donald "Deke" Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra and John Glenn. All seven were awarded instant hero status by an adoring media and predicting which one would become the first American in space became a national pastime.

 

The first two Mercury flights were to be sub-orbital up-and-down missions using Redstone rockets. The primary goals of these 15-minute cannonball shots were to prove a human being -- and the Mercury capsule -- could function in the weightless environment of space. Starting with the third Mercury flight, more powerful Atlas rockets would boost astronauts into orbit.

 

Keeping America in suspense, NASA announced Shepard, Grissom and Glenn were all in training for the first mission. Most observers believed the determined Glenn would win the assignment, but they were wrong. Shepard ultimately was assigned to the first mission, Grissom the second and Glenn the third.

 

But the Soviet Union upstaged NASA again on April 12, 1961 -- just three weeks before Shepard's flight -- when Gagarin was successfully launched on a one-orbit flight. Shepard's mission was a success, as was Grissom's on July 21. But up-and-down sub-orbital flights, while important, were simply not in the same league as Gagarin's feat.

 

The Russian triumph "was a real blow," Glenn said. "It took on the context not just of a space race. They were using what they claimed as their superiority to sell their brand of government, sell communism, and this was a real thing to be considered back in those days."

 

And so the stage was set for John Glenn to answer the Soviet challenge and in so doing, walk into history as one of America's most celebrated heroes.

 

First orbital flight makes history

 

After 11 delays due to bad weather and technical problems, Glenn strapped into his Friendship 7 Mercury capsule at 6:03 a.m. local time on Feb. 20, 1962. The sky was overcast, but clearing, and the countdown proceeded in fits and starts as technicians dealt with a series of minor problems. Unlike the Soviet Union's space program, NASA was chartered as a civilian agency, operating in the glare of television lights.

 

At 9 a.m. local time, "Glenn, the blockhouse and control center crews, and workers scurrying around and climbing on the gantry were joined by some 100 million people watching television sets in about 40 million homes throughout the United States," according to a NASA history. "Countless others huddled around radios in their homes or places of business and about 50,000 'bird watchers' stood on the beaches near Cape Canaveral, squinting toward the erect rocket gleaming in the distance."

 

Said Glenn: "It was almost like Hollywood designed the set. You have a booster there, and you have night shots of it with klieg lights crossing in the sky and vapor coming off of the cold tank in the moist air down there in Florida. It was just so dramatic."

 

Finally, after a final hold in the countdown to fix a tracking station problem, Glenn's Atlas 109-D booster ignited with a ground-shaking roar at 9:47 a.m. local time and slowly climbed skyward. With memories of recent Atlas failures still fresh, millions around the world held their collective breath for the rocket's lumbering ascent on television, sharing in the drama as it unfolded.

 

"Glenn reports all spacecraft systems go! Mercury Control is go!" commentator Shorty Powers said from mission control.

 

Asked if he felt fear during the launching, Glenn liked to joke: "How do you think you'd feel if you were on top of two million parts built by the lowest bidder on a government contract? But it was more serious than that, obviously, and we just wanted to get the thing going."

 

About five minutes after liftoff, the Atlas's sustainer engine shut down and Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule slipped into orbit. "I guess I'd like a glass capsule," he said, marveling at the view.

 

The first orbit went smoothly as Glenn tested his craft's control systems while working through a detailed checklist. He witnessed his first orbital sunset over the Indian Ocean and an equally spectacular sunrise over the south Pacific, reporting thousands of "little specks, brilliant specks, floating around outside the capsule." Those specks later were determined to be ice crystals.

 

As Glenn completed his first orbit, engineers noticed one of his small steering rockets was malfunctioning, causing problems for the capsule's automatic attitude control system. Glenn took over manual control and proved to skeptics on the ground that a skilled pilot was a critical element in spaceflight.

 

But a more serious problem soon developed. Telemetry from Friendship 7 indicated the capsule's heat shield and a compressed shock-absorbing landing bag were no longer firmly locked in place at the base of the spacecraft. If that were true, the heat shield probably would rip free during re-entry and Glenn would be burned to a cinder. Flight Director Christopher Kraft decided the astronaut should be safe as long as he did not jettison his retropackage, a cluster of three solid-fuel braking rockets that normally would be cut away after use.

 

Kraft reasoned that straps holding the retrorockets in place also would hold the heat shield in position until enough aerodynamic pressure developed to take over.

 

"Boy, that feels like I'm going halfway back to Hawaii," Glenn radioed as the retrorockets finally fired, committing Friendship 7 to a fiery plunge back to Earth.

 

"Now came one of the most dramatic and critical moments of all of Project Mercury," a NASA historian wrote. "In the Mercury Control Center, at the tracking stations and on the recovery ships ringing the globe, engineers, technicians, physicians, recovery personnel and fellow astronauts stood nervously, stared at their consoles and listened to the communications circuits. Was the [telemetry] reading on the landing bag and heat shield correct? If so, would the straps on the retropack keep the heat shield in place long enough during recovery? And even if they did, was the thermal protection designed and developed into the Mercury spacecraft truly adequate? Would this, America's first manned orbital flight, end in the incineration of the astronaut? The whole Mercury team felt itself on trial and awaited the verdict."

 

As Friendship 7 fell to Earth, engulfed in a fireball of atmospheric friction, Glenn himself wondered if he would survive. "I thought the retropack had jettisoned and saw chunks coming off and flying by the window," he said later.

 

"It made for a very  spectacular re-entry from where I was sitting," Glenn said later. "During re-entry, large portions of burning retro rocket pack came flying by the window. I kept working, controlling the attitude of the spacecraft, trying to determine whether it was the rocket pack or the heat shield breaking up. Fortunately, it was the rocket pack or I wouldn't be answering these questions today."

 

Glenn splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean about 40 miles short of the predicted landing zone and was picked up 25 minutes later by the U.S. destroyer Noa. Mission duration, from launch to landing, was four hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds.

 

Glenn returned to a hero's welcome. He addressed a joint session of Congress, enjoyed a rare ticker-tape parade in New York City and paid a high-profile visit to John F. Kennedy's White House. The two later became close friends. When the frenzy finally died down, Glenn returned to work at NASA and asked to be put back on the list of candidates for future flights. But NASA managers surprisingly hesitated, asking Glenn instead to take on a job in senior management. Glenn balked and resigned from NASA in 1964.

 

Years later, he discovered that President Kennedy, worried about the possibility Glenn - the American hero - could be killed on a future space flight, told NASA officials not to let him fly again.

 

"By the time I heard that ... he had been dead for some time," Glenn recalled. "I just knew they didn't want me to be reassigned again right away, so I went on to other things."

 

From astronaut to senator

 

Glenn resigned from the Marine Corps on Jan. 1, 1965 and spent nearly a decade as a business executive, becoming president of the Royal Crown Cola company. He made several runs for the U.S. Senate, finally winning a seat in 1974 as a moderate Democrat from Ohio.

 

During 25 years in the Senate, until he retired in 1999 after four terms, Glenn distinguished himself as a member of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, becoming a strong voice in shaping the nation's foreign policy and arms control agreements during the waning years of the Cold War. Glenn was also proud of his role as a leading federal advocate for science and health research. 

 

He was in the running for Vice President in 1976, though Jimmy Carter eventually chose Senator Walter Mondale instead. In 1984, Glenn mounted his own brief, unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

 

The only blemish on an otherwise impeccable record of public service was a 1989 scandal involving Glenn and four other lawmakers who were accused of improperly intervening on behalf of Charles Keating, chairman of a savings and loan that collapsed in a $3 billion failure. The Senate Ethics Committee ultimately ruled that three of the lawmakers had, in fact, interfered with the savings and loan investigation. Glenn and John McCain were cleared, although both were criticized for poor judgment.

 

The John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy was founded at Ohio State University in 1998 and later became the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. But space exploration remained a defining theme in Glenn's life.

 

"You know, people have looked up for tens of thousands of years and wondered what was up there," Glenn said. "In our lifetime we're going up there and using this new laboratory of space. What a fortunate time we are in, and what a great time in history to be around when we can participate in things like this."

 

Glenn was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Among the dozens of other honors he held were six Distinguished Flying Crosses, a wide variety of military commendations and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

 

Return to space

 

The lure of spaceflight never dimmed and as his Senate career wound down, Glenn waged a quietly relentless campaign to win a seat on a space shuttle, developing a detailed plan to serve as a medical guinea pig for a battery of medical experiments aimed at shedding light on the physiology of aging and on what might be done to counteract a variety of elderly ailments.

 

After a detailed review of the proposed research and after Glenn passed a rigorous NASA medical exam, then NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin announced in January 1997 that he had decided to add Glenn to the crew of shuttle mission STS-95. At 77, he would become the oldest human to fly in space.

 

"When someone who has risked their life countless times for our space program and our country comes to you and asks: 'I'm willing to take the risk of space flight and serve my country again because I think we could do more to benefit the lives of older Americans. Can I go?' If that person proves they have a unique blend of experience, expertise and excellent health, the answer is certainly yes.

 

"What a great day for America," Goldin added. "Because the man who, almost 36 years ago, climbed into the Friendship 7 [Mercury capsule] and showed the boundless promise for a new generation is now poised to show the world that senior citizens have the right stuff."

 

For his part, Glenn insisted "it is not going to be 'The John Glenn Flight.' I'm here to be a member of this crew and work with everybody else. I'll be doing some of the experiments myself, I'll be backing up some of the other people. I'm here as a working crew member and that's it. I hope everybody concentrates on the science of this thing."

 

That was a tall order, given Glenn's age and enduring fame. Even his crewmates were a bit awed at flying with the famous astronaut.

 

"My initial response was this is too good to be true, this is science fiction," said Mission Specialist Scott Parazynski, who was seven months old when Glenn first blasted off in 1962. "To put it in perspective, this would be like a physicist having the opportunity to make a great discovery with Albert Einstein, or a mountaineer to summit a Himalayan mountain with Sir Edmund Hillary. This, for an astronaut, is about as exciting as it gets."

 

Not everyone agreed. Several former astronauts criticized Glenn's assignment, saying the 77-year-old senator was not physically up to the challenge of certain emergency scenarios and thus posed a threat to his crewmates. They also questioned the statistical significance of Glenn's research, saying data collected on a single subject could not be applied to a broad population.

 

Writing in Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, former astronaut Michael Mullane, veteran of three shuttle missions, said "the shuttle is not an airliner. The threat of various, severe emergencies is very real."

 

"Visualize a launch pad emergency, in-flight bailout or a crash landing," he said. "Trying to escape from a shuttle in a time-critical situation with 83 pounds of equipment strapped to your body requires muscle and lightning fast reactions. I am particularly concerned about a ground egress that would require Glenn (sitting downstairs) to negotiate (in a full pressure suit) the narrow, seven-foot ladder up to the cockpit, then climb onto the shuttle roof and rappel over the side of the orbiter."

 

As for Glenn's research agenda, Mullane wrote "if such research is needed, you would think NASA would have selected more senior citizens or a doctor of geriatric studies from the latest astronaut class. A 'one data point' Glenn mission doesn't sound like good science."

 

Glenn disagreed. During a news conference at launch pad 39B, the senator told a throng of reporters that his critics were off base, saying "I've been adequately trained for this mission as any payload specialist is."

 

"I'm not back as a legislative passenger," he said. "I'm back as a science passenger. And that was the basis on which I was selected, the basis on which I have trained. And that's what my objective is on my flight. If there are others who have a different view of that, well I'd just ask them to look at what we've been doing, look at the training, look at the experiments in detail and then make their judgments, not make it on some preconceived idea they may have had earlier."

 

As for the value of the research program, Glenn said "the people that have said there wasn't any science on this, when I have talked to them or sent them material to review about the science we're doing on this ... they have changed their minds. I wish all the people had looked at some of these things before they made some of their public statements."

 

With President Bill Clinton and a throng of lawmakers, VIPs, journalists and uncounted thousands of citizens looking on, Discovery rocketed away from the Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 29, 1998. Unlike his first flight in 1962, Glenn made the climb to orbit aboard Discovery strapped into a seat on the shuttle's lower deck. He donned medical instrumentation shortly after reaching orbit, beginning a full slate of research activities that continued for the duration of the mission.

 

"We know the 'whats' of aging," Glenn said. "But I want to try to contribute more to learning about the 'whys' of aging. Hopefully we can lessen the frailties of old age that plague so many people. And we can learn something maybe at the same time that can help the younger astronauts going up there for extended flights also. One way we might be able to get at those whys is through studying similarities between the aging process and what occurs to astronauts while they're in space."

 

Glenn first began thinking about similarities between aging and the effects of weightlessness in 1995. But Goldin was reluctant to give his permission. In the wake of the 1986 Challenger disaster, NASA was roundly criticized for giving a shuttle seat to a private citizen, school teacher Christa McAuliffe. The Teacher in Space program was put on indefinite hold after the accident, plans to fly a journalist were canceled and Goldin made no secret of the fact that he did not plan to reinstitute either program.

 

But Glenn was not your average private citizen. A popular senator and a bona fide American hero, he waged a determined campaign and in the end, apparently without White House prodding, Goldin gave in.

 

"There was no intervention that caused it to happen," said space analyst John Logsdon of President Bill Clinton's administration. "More to the point, I think the one thing the White House could have done was veto it, and they obviously did not do that. So it became Goldin's decision."

 

Glenn clearly enjoyed his second spaceflight, telling interviewers he did not suffer from space adaptation syndrome, the temporary bout of nausea that affects about half the men and women who fly in space. He even joked about the food and life in orbit during an interview with comedian Jay Leno.

 

"Does Sen. Glenn keep telling you how tough it was in the old days, how cramped it was, how small it was, how lucky you young punks are?" Leno asked shuttle commander Curt Brown.

 

"Well Jay, actually no," Brown replied. "He doesn't always do that. Only when he's awake."

 

Leno asked Glenn to compare the food available aboard the space shuttle and aboard his Mercury capsule.

 

"Well, back in those days, you know, we had very plain food, applesauce and so on," Glenn said. "This time I can have my Tang mixed with either Geritol or Metamucil so I can take my choice."

 

Back on Earth after nine days in weightlessness, Glenn said he "didn't feel so hot" immediately after landing and that he had to walk slowly to keep his balance. But 24 hours later, the 77-year-old astronaut said he felt nearly normal and was elated with the outcome of his historic shuttle mission.

 

"Obviously, I was walking a little straddle-legged there to keep my balance a little bit," said Glenn, looking fit and chipper in his blue flight suit. "But everything went very well. We went through all the medical tests yesterday and as far as I know everything's coming out very well. For two weeks, almost three weeks, we'll be going through very extensive medical tests. ... So we're hard at it again on all the follow-ups to everything that happened on the mission."

 

As for his physical condition after landing, Glenn said "when you come back from something like this you feel maybe a little bit woozy. I'm probably 95 or 98 percent back to normal now. I'm not whipping my head around quite yet, but that'll come over the next few days, I guess. I feel great."

 

For Glenn, the return to Earth was much more benign than his first trip home back in 1962 when he experienced a braking force of seven to eight G's during re-entry in a cramped Mercury capsule. Aboard the shuttle, he was subjected to about one-and-a-half Gs. And, of course, the trip home took quite a while longer.

 

Even though he felt a bit shaky, Glenn said he was determined to walk off the shuttle under his own power, adding "if I'd been on my hands and knees I was going to do it. I wasn't quite to that point."

 

"But obviously, I was not doing my best gait out there yesterday," he said. "When we got out, I was kind of, not disoriented, that would be too strong a word for it, but you're walking very straddle legged like this so you can keep your balance because if you tip too far one way you can't catch yourself. The pressure on me was just to be there as a crew member rather than what any other outside perception might be."

 

Glenn and his crewmates flew back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston after participating in the most heavily attended shuttle news conference in years. All seven appeared in good spirits as Glenn fielded a steady stream of questions from the media. Asked what he planned for the future, Glenn said he had no definite plans beyond spending more time with his wife, Annie, and working with college students in his home state of Ohio.

 

"I don't worry about the future of this country as far as being taken over from outside," he said. "I do worry when so many people have such a cynical and apathetic attitude toward government, politics, things that make this country go and implement our democracy, implement the Constitution. And I think it's important we not let that kind of attitude prevail too long or we will go downhill. So I'll be working on some of those things with the students back in Ohio and elsewhere around the country and I look forward to that."

 

Asked if his flight aboard Discovery was definitely his last space voyage, Glenn said his wife had left little doubt on that score.

 

"Annie has demanded that I spend more of my time with her than I've been able to do in the past and I think that's a reasonable look to the future," he said. "I have no big plans past that."

 

But he left no doubt that at least some of his time would be devoted to NASA and the nation's space program.

 

"I do strongly believe in this program and firmly believe we're getting a lot of good information, and if I can help out in some way and help relay this kind of information back and forth to the American people so they can appreciate the importance of it, why I'd like to do that."

 

Speaking with CBS newsman Walter Cronkite by radio during his shuttle mission, Glenn said he had hoped the United States would be further along in space than it actually was.

 

"But we have a lot of demands on our budget," he said. "I wish we were putting more into it because I think it's so valuable. This country got to be where it is because we put money into research and exploration, and we didn't try to solve every problem before we moved off the East Coast. If we had, we'd still be there. But we've made tremendous strides with science. This, of course, is out on the cutting edge of science with benefits for everybody right there in their homes across the country."

 

Cronkite then asked Glenn "where do you think we might be 36 years from now?"

 

"I would presume we will have tried a Mars mission by that time, we'll probably be on Mars, maybe we'll have put another station back on the moon," Glenn said. "I would hope we'd have a lot of experience and new results out of the space station by that time. ... There's just no limit to what we could do."

 

John Glenn, the 1st American to orbit Earth, has died at 95

 

Seth Borenstein - Associated Press (December 8)

 

John Glenn, whose 1962 flight as the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth made him an all-American hero and propelled him to a long career in the U.S. Senate, died Thursday. The last survivor of the original Mercury 7 astronauts was 95.

 

Glenn died at the James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where he was hospitalized for more than a week, said Hank Wilson, communications director for the John Glenn School of Public Affairs.

 

John Herschel Glenn Jr. had two major career paths that often intersected: flying and politics, and he soared in both of them.

 

Before he gained fame orbiting the world, he was a fighter pilot in two wars, and as a test pilot, he set a transcontinental speed record. He later served 24 years in the Senate from Ohio. A rare setback was a failed 1984 run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

 

His long political career enabled him to return to space in the shuttle Discovery at age 77 in 1998, a cosmic victory lap that he relished and turned into a teachable moment about growing old. He holds the record for the oldest person in space.

 

More than anything, Glenn was the ultimate and uniquely American space hero: a combat veteran with an easy smile, a strong marriage of 70 years and nerves of steel. Schools, a space center and the Columbus airport were named after him. So were children.

 

The Soviet Union leaped ahead in space exploration by putting the Sputnik 1 satellite in orbit in 1957, and then launched the first man in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in a 108-minute orbital flight on April 12, 1961. After two suborbital flights by Alan Shepard Jr. and Gus Grissom, it was up to Glenn to be the first American to orbit the Earth.

 

"Godspeed, John Glenn," fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter radioed just before Glenn thundered off a Cape Canaveral launch pad, now a National Historic Landmark, to a place America had never been. At the time of that Feb. 20, 1962, flight, Glenn was 40 years old.

 

With the all-business phrase, "Roger, the clock is operating, we're underway," Glenn radioed to Earth as he started his 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds in space. Years later, he explained he said that because he didn't feel like he had lifted off and it was the only way he knew he had launched.

 

During the flight, Glenn uttered a phrase that he would repeat frequently throughout life: "Zero G, and I feel fine."

 

"It still seems so vivid to me," Glenn said in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press on the 50th anniversary of the flight. "I still can sort of pseudo feel some of those same sensations I had back in those days during launch and all."

 

Glenn said he was often asked if he was afraid, and he replied, "If you are talking about fear that overcomes what you are supposed to do, no. You've trained very hard for those flights."

 

Glenn's ride in the cramped Friendship 7 capsule had its scary moments, however. Sensors showed his heat shield was loose after three orbits, and Mission Control worried he might burn up during re-entry when temperatures reached 3,000 degrees. But the heat shield held.

 

Even before then, Glenn flew in dangerous skies. He was a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea who flew low, got his plane riddled with bullets, flew with baseball great Ted Williams and earned macho nicknames during 149 combat missions. And as a test pilot he broke aviation records.

 

The green-eyed, telegenic Marine even won $25,000 on the game show "Name That Tune" with a 10-year-old partner. And that was before April 6, 1959, when his life changed by being selected as one of the Mercury 7 astronauts and instantly started attracting more than his share of the spotlight.

 

Glenn in later years regaled crowds with stories of NASA's testing of would-be astronauts, from psychological tests - come with 20 answers to the open-ended question "I am" - to surviving spinning that pushed 16 times normal gravity against his body, popping blood vessels.

 

But it wasn't nearly as bad as coming to Cape Canaveral to see the first unmanned rocket test.

 

"We're watching this thing go up and up and up ... and all at once it blew up right over us, and that was our introduction to the Atlas," Glenn said in 2011. "We looked at each other and wanted to have a meeting with the engineers in the morning."

 

In 1959, Glenn wrote in Life magazine: "Space travel is at the frontier of my profession. It is going to be accomplished, and I want to be in on it. There is also an element of simple duty involved. I am convinced that I have something to give this project."

 

That sense of duty was instilled at an early age. Glenn was born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, and grew up in New Concord, Ohio, with the nickname "Bud." He joined the town band as a trumpeter at age 10 and accompanied his father one Memorial Day in an echoing version of "Taps." In his 1999 memoir, Glenn wrote "that feeling sums up my childhood. It formed my beliefs and my sense of responsibility. Everything that came after that just came naturally."

 

His love of flight was lifelong; John Glenn Sr. spoke of the many summer evenings he arrived home to find his son running around the yard with outstretched arms, pretending he was piloting a plane. Last June, at a ceremony renaming the Columbus airport for him, Glenn recalled imploring his parents to take him to that airport to look at planes whenever they passed through the city: "It was something I was fascinated with." He piloted his own private plane until age 90.

 

Glenn's goal of becoming a commercial pilot was changed by World War II. He left Muskingum College to join the Naval Air Corps and soon after, the Marines.

 

He became a successful fighter pilot who ran 59 hazardous missions, often as a volunteer or as the requested backup of assigned pilots. A war later, in Korea, he earned the nickname "MiG-Mad Marine" (or "Old Magnet A - ," which he sometimes paraphrased as "Old Magnet Tail.")

 

"I was the one who went in low and got them," Glenn said, explaining that he often landed with huge holes in the side of his aircraft because he didn't like to shoot from high altitudes.

 

Glenn's public life began when he broke the transcontinental airspeed record, bursting from Los Angeles to New York City in three hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds. With his Crusader averaging 725 mph, the 1957 flight proved the jet could endure stress when pushed to maximum speeds over long distances.

 

In New York, he got a hero's welcome - his first tickertape parade. He got another after his flight on Friendship 7.

 

That mission also introduced Glenn to politics. He addressed a joint session of Congress, and dined at the White House. He became friends with President Kennedy and ally and friend of his brother Robert. The Kennedys urged him to enter politics, and after a difficult few starts he did.

 

Glenn spent 24 years in the U.S. Senate, representing Ohio longer than any other senator in the state's history. He announced his impending retirement in 1997, 35 years to the day after he became the first American in orbit, saying, "There is still no cure for the common birthday."

 

Glenn returned to space in a long-awaited second flight in 1998 aboard the space shuttle Discovery. He got to move around aboard the shuttle for far longer - nine days compared with just under five hours in 1962 - as well as sleep and experiment with bubbles in weightlessness.

 

In a news conference from space, Glenn said, "To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible."

 

NASA tailored a series of geriatric-reaction experiments to create a scientific purpose for Glenn's mission, but there was more to it than that: a revival of the excitement of the earliest days of the space race, a public relations bonanza and the gift of a lifetime.

 

"America owed John Glenn a second flight," NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said.

 

Glenn would later write that when he mentioned the idea of going back into space to his wife, Annie, she responded: "Over my dead body."

 

Glenn and his crewmates flew 3.6 million miles, compared with 75,000 miles aboard Friendship 7.

 

Shortly before he ran for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, a new generation was introduced to astronaut Glenn with the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff." He was portrayed as the ultimate straight arrow amid a group of hard-partying astronauts.

 

Glenn said in 2011: "I don't think any of us cared for the movie 'The Right Stuff'; I know I didn't."

 

Glenn was unable to capitalize on the publicity, though, and his poorly organized campaign was short-lived. He dropped out of the race with his campaign $2.5 million in the red - a debt that lingered even after he retired from the Senate in 1999.

 

He later joked that except for going into debt, humiliating his family and gaining 16 pounds, running for president was a good experience.

 

Glenn generally steered clear of campaigns after that, saying he didn't want to mix politics with his second space flight. He sat out the Senate race to succeed him - he was hundreds of miles above Earth on Election Day - and largely was quiet in the 2000 presidential race.

 

He first ran for the Senate in 1964 but left the race when he suffered a concussion after slipping in the bathroom and hitting his head on the tub.

 

He tried again in 1970 but was defeated in the primary by Howard Metzenbaum, who later lost the general election to Robert Taft Jr. It was the start of a complex relationship with Metzenbaum, whom he later joined in the Senate.

 

For the next four years, Glenn devoted his attention to business and investments that made him a multimillionaire. He had joined the board of Royal Crown Cola after the aborted 1964 campaign and was president of Royal Crown International from 1967 to 1969. In the early 1970s, he remained with Royal Crown and invested in a chain of Holiday Inns.

 

In 1974, Glenn ran against Metzenbaum in what turned into a bitter primary and won the election. He eventually made peace with Metzenbaum, who won election to the Senate in 1976.

 

Glenn set a record in 1980 by winning re-election with a 1.6 million vote margin.

 

He became an expert on nuclear weaponry and was the Senate's most dogged advocate of nonproliferation. He was the leading supporter of the B-1 bomber when many in Congress doubted the need for it. As chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, he turned a microscope on waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy.

 

Glenn said the lowest point of his life was 1990, when he and four other senators came under scrutiny for their connections to Charles Keating, the notorious financier who eventually served prison time for his role in the costly savings and loan failure of the 1980s. The Senate Ethics Committee cleared Glenn of serious wrongdoing but said he "exercised poor judgment."

 

The episode was the only brush with scandal in his long public career and didn't diminish his popularity in Ohio.

 

Glenn joked that the only astronaut he was envious of was his fellow Ohioan: Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

 

"I've been very fortunate to have a lot of great experiences in my life and I'm thankful for them," he said in 2012.

 

In 1943, Glenn married his childhood sweetheart, Anna Margaret Castor. They met when they were toddlers, and when she had mumps as a teenager, he came to her house, cut a hole in her bedroom window screen, and passed her a radio to keep her company, a friend recounted.

 

"I don't remember the first time I told Annie I loved her, or the first time she told me," Glenn would write in his memoir. "It was just something we both knew." He bought her a diamond engagement ring in 1942 for $125. It's never been replaced.

 

They had two children, Carolyn and John David.

 

He and his wife, Annie, split their later years between Washington and Columbus. Both served as trustees at their alma mater, Muskingum College. Glenn spent time promoting the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, which also houses an archive of his private papers and photographs.

 

Former U.S. astronaut, Senator John Glenn dies in Ohio at 95

 

Will Dunham - Reuters (December 8)

 

John Glenn, who became one of the 20th century's greatest explorers as the first American to orbit Earth and later as the world's oldest astronaut, in addition to a long career as a U.S. senator, died on Thursday at age of 95.

 

Glenn, the last surviving member of the original seven American "Right Stuff" Mercury astronauts, died at the James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State University, said Hank Wilson, a spokesman at the university's John Glenn College of Public Affairs, which Glenn helped found.

 

Glenn was credited with reviving U.S. pride after the Soviet Union's early domination of manned space exploration. His three laps around the world in the Friendship 7 capsule on Feb. 20, 1962, forged a powerful link between the former fighter pilot and the Kennedy-era quest to explore outer space as a "New Frontier."

 

President Barack Obama said that "with John's passing, our nation has lost an icon."

 

"When John Glenn blasted off from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas rocket in 1962, he lifted the hopes of a nation," Obama said in a statement. "And when his Friendship 7 spacecraft splashed down a few hours later, the first American to orbit the Earth reminded us that with courage and a spirit of discovery there's no limit to the heights we can reach together."

 

President-elect Donald Trump said in a tweet that the nation had lost "a great pioneer of air and space in John Glenn. He was a hero and inspired generations of future explorers."

 

As the third of seven astronauts in NASA's solo-flight Mercury program to venture into space, Glenn became more of a media fixture than any of the others and was known for his composure and willingness to promote the program.

 

Glenn's astronaut career, as well as his record as a fighter pilot in World War Two and the Korean War, helped propel him to the U.S. Senate in 1974, where he represented his home state of Ohio for 24 years as a moderate Democrat.

 

But his star was dimmed somewhat by a Senate investigation of several senators on whether special favors were done for a major campaign contributor. He was cleared of wrongdoing.

 

Glenn's entry into history came in early 1961 when fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter bade him "Godspeed, John Glenn" just before the Ohio native was rocketed into space for a record-breaking trip that would last just under five hours.

 

'VIEW IS TREMENDOUS'

 

"Zero-G (gravity) and I feel fine," was Glenn's succinct assessment of weightlessness several minutes into his mission. "... Oh, and that view is tremendous."

 

After splashdown and recovery in the Atlantic, Glenn was treated as a hero, addressing a joint session of Congress and being feted in a New York ticker-tape parade.

 

The U.S space agency said on Twitter, "We are saddened by the loss of Sen. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. A true American hero. Godspeed, John Glenn. Ad Astra." Ad Astra is Latin for "To the stars."

 

U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, who orbited Earth aboard space shuttle Columbia in 1986, said, "On top of paving the way for the rest of us, he was also a first-class gentleman and an unabashed patriot."

 

Glenn's experiences as a pioneer astronaut were chronicled in the book and movie "The Right Stuff," along with the other Mercury pilots. The book's author, Tom Wolfe, called Glenn "the last true national hero America has ever had."

 

"I don't think of myself that way," Glenn told the New York Times in 2012 to mark the 50th anniversary of his flight. "I get up each day and have the same problems others have at my age. As far as trying to analyze all the attention I received, I will leave that to others."

 

Glenn's historic flight made him a favorite of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, who encouraged him to launch a political career that finally took off after a period as a businessman made him a millionaire.

 

HERO STATUS

 

Even before his Mercury flight, Glenn qualified for hero status, earning six Distinguished Flying Crosses and flying more than 150 missions in World War Two and the Korean War.

 

After Korea, Glenn became a test pilot, setting a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York in 1957.

 

The determination and single-mindedness that marked Glenn's military and space career did not save him from misjudgments and defeat in politics. He lost his first bid for the Senate from Ohio in 1970, after abandoning a race in 1964 because of a head injury suffered in a fall.

 

He was elected in 1974 and was briefly considered as a running mate for Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in 1980. But a ponderous address at the Democratic National Convention - people walked out - caused Carter to remark that Glenn was "the most boring man I ever met."

 

Glenn sought the Democratic presidential nomination himself in 1984 but was quickly eliminated by eventual nominee Walter Mondale, Carter's vice president. His failure was all the more stinging because he had been touted as an early front-runner.

 

In the Senate, Glenn was respected as a thoughtful moderate with expertise in defense and foreign policy. But his career's luster was dulled by a Senate investigation of the "Keating Five" - five senators suspected of doing favors for campaign contributor Charles Keating Jr. The panel eventually found Glenn did nothing improper or illegal.

 

BACK TO SPACE

 

He took a leading role in seeking to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, especially to Pakistan. He was the author of a law that forced the United States to impose sanctions on India and Pakistan in 1998 after both countries conducted nuclear tests.

 

He also was a staunch advocate of a strong military and took a keen interest in strategic issues. He retired from the Senate in 1999.

 

Thirty-six years after his maiden space voyage, Glenn became America's first geriatric astronaut on Oct. 29, 1998. He was 77 years old when he blasted off as a mission specialist aboard the shuttle Discovery. He saw it as a blow to stereotyping of the elderly.

 

"Maybe prior to this flight, we were looked at as old geezers who ought to get out of the way," Glenn said after his nine-day shuttle mission. "Just because you're up in years some doesn't mean you don't have hopes and dreams and aspirations just as much as younger people do."

 

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio.

 

In his latter years he was an adjunct professor at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

 

He had a knee replacement operation in 2011 and underwent heart surgery in 2014.

 

Glenn is survived by his wife of 73 years, his childhood sweetheart, Annie Castor. They had two children, David and Lyn.

 

John Glenn, First American To Orbit The Earth, Dies At 95

 

Russell Lewis - National Public Radio (December 8)

 

The first American to orbit the Earth has died. John Glenn was the last surviving member of the original Mercury astronauts. He would later have a long political career as a U.S. senator, but that didn't stop his pioneering ways.

 

Glenn made history a second time in 1998, when he flew aboard the shuttle Discovery to become the oldest person to fly in space.

 

Glenn was 95 when he died; he had been hospitalized in an Ohio State University medical center in Columbus since last week.

 

Glenn had been battling health issues since a stroke a few years ago. His death Thursday was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University.

 

President Obama said that Glenn's trailblazing showed "with courage and a spirit of discovery there's no limit to the heights we can reach together." The president said, "John always had the right stuff, inspiring generations of scientists, engineers and astronauts. ... On behalf of a grateful nation, Godspeed, John Glenn."

 

An early explorer

 

On Feb. 20, 1962, when John Glenn rocketed into space, it was momentous and nerve-wracking. Space travel was in its infancy. Every launch and mission captivated the imagination of America.

 

A few minutes after liftoff, Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule reached orbit. People listened in with excitement and awe.

 

"Roger, zero G and I feel fine," Glenn relayed from space. "Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous!"

 

So much about space in those days was unknown. Scientists designed experiments to study whether astronauts could eat or drink in space. Doctors were concerned that human eyes would change shape, making it hard to operate during re-entry.

 

Then there was the technology. Rockets exploded during testing, sometimes with the astronauts watching. In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of his Mercury flight, Glenn reflected on the danger.

 

"It was important because of the Cold War," Glenn said at a Smithsonian forum. "It was a new step forward, and we were proud to be representing our country there. And so ... you made it as safe as you possibly could, and what little bit of risk was left, we accepted that."

 

Any trip to space is risky, and Glenn's mission was no exception. During his five hour, three-orbit flight, there were some tense moments after faulty warnings about his heat shield. At a post-flight news conference, Glenn was characteristically cool. "So there were some moments of doubt there as to whether the heat shield had been damaged and whether it might be tearing up itself. And this ... this could have been a bad day all the way around if this had been the case."

 

After the flight, he became a national hero. He befriended President John F. Kennedy and received a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

 

"I think John Glenn will be remembered as an actual hero at a time when heroes are often called heroes but are not," says Francis French, the author of many books on the space program's early days.

 

French says Glenn was basically an all-American boy with a photogenic smile and a quick wit.

 

"I think John Glenn is one of those people that's going to stay in the history books," he says. "And even the most cynical of history readers is going to go, 'This guy actually is what everybody says he was.' "

 

French says Glenn was "exactly at the right place at the right time for when America needed somebody to not only become the first American to orbit the Earth but to actually project what it meant for America to put a person into space."

 

A life in flight and politics

 

Glenn was a highly decorated Marine who flew 59 combat missions in the South Pacific during World War II. During the Korean War, he flew 90 combat missions, using different models of new jet fighters.

 

He remained in the military through the 1950s, testing supersonic aircraft and other military models. In all, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross five times. In 1958 he was one of 508 pilots tested for what became the Mercury program, an accelerated response to the Soviet Union's successful launch of the first satellite in 1957.

 

He left NASA in 1964. Later he would learn that at the time, NASA and Kennedy had deemed him too valuable to fly in space again.

 

In 1974, he was elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate. Two years later, Glenn's name was among those mentioned as a running mate for Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, but Carter ended up picking Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota.

 

Glenn campaigned in the Democratic primary for the 1984 presidential election, but ended up losing to Mondale.

 

But he remained in the Senate, serving four six-year terms.

 

During his Senate career he was noted for his attention to NASA and to national defense. He was also remembered for his support for the Panama Canal treaty in the late 1970s and for his resistance to the decision to televise the Senate floor debates on C-SPAN. He warned that the Senate's reputation for deliberation would suffer if it became, in effect, a TV show. He retired from politics in 1999.

 

A pioneer once again

 

But as his political career was ending, he wanted to go back into space. In 1998, he lobbied NASA to fly again. Glenn spent nine days aboard the shuttle Discovery — for science.

 

"For four days, I had 21 different leads — brainwaves and respiration and EKG — 21 different body parameters being recorded and sent down to the ground," Glenn said in 2011.

 

As a 77-year-old, he became the oldest person to fly in space. His flight revived public interest in NASA. When NASA canceled the shuttle program and scaled back its ambitious exploration efforts, Glenn lamented the loss. He spoke during a 2011 forum at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

 

"The average person [was] better educated ... back years ago than most people in the world. And then we put more into basic research and learned the new things first," he said. "That little combination is just as true today. If we lose that edge in research and education, we won't be a leading nation in the world. It's that simple."

 

Former senator, astronaut John Glenn dies at 95

 

Tricia Escobedo, Ashley Strickland & John Zarrella - CNN (December 8)

 

John Glenn, a former US senator and the first American to orbit the Earth, died Thursday, according to Ohio State University. He was 95.

 

It was announced Wednesday that Glenn had been hospitalized "more than a week ago," according to Ohio State University spokesman Hank Wilson. He was at The James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State University, but his illness was not disclosed.

 

Glenn had heart valve replacement surgery in 2014.

 

President Obama released a statement Thursday afternoon to honor Glenn.

 

"When John Glenn blasted off from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas rocket in 1962, he lifted the hopes of a nation. And when his Friendship 7 spacecraft splashed down a few hours later, the first American to orbit the Earth reminded us that with courage and a spirit of discovery there's no limit to the heights we can reach together.

 

"With John's passing, our nation has lost an icon and Michelle and I have lost a friend. John spent his life breaking barriers, from defending our freedom as a decorated Marine Corps fighter pilot in World War II and Korea, to setting a transcontinental speed record, to becoming, at age 77, the oldest human to touch the stars. John always had the right stuff, inspiring generations of scientists, engineers and astronauts who will take us to Mars and beyond--not just to visit, but to stay.

 

"Today, the people of Ohio remember a devoted public servant who represented his fellow Buckeyes in the U.S. Senate for a quarter century and who fought to keep America a leader in science and technology. Our thoughts are with his beloved wife Annie, their children John and Carolyn and the entire Glenn family. The last of America's first astronauts has left us, but propelled by their example we know that our future here on Earth compels us to keep reaching for the heavens. On behalf of a grateful nation, Godspeed, John Glenn."

 

Social media was flooded with remembrances and reactions immediately after news of his death.

 

A fascination with flight

 

John Herschel Glenn Jr. made history in 1962 when he completed a three-orbit flight in a cramped space capsule dubbed Friendship 7. He later served for nearly a quarter-century as a US senator. In 1998, he returned to space at age 77, becoming the oldest person to ever do so.

 

Born in the small eastern Ohio town of Cambridge on July 18, 1921, Glenn recounted an idyllic childhood where "patriotism filled the air."

 

"Love of country was a given. Defense of its ideals was an obligation," Glenn wrote in his memoir. "The opportunity to join in its quests and explorations was a challenge not only to fulfill a sacred duty but to join a joyous adventure."

 

Glenn developed a fascination with flying at an early age. When he was 8 years old, he and his father went for a ride in an open-cockpit biplane, two years after Charles Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight. That adventure sealed his destiny as a pilot.

 

He also developed an early love for childhood playmate Anna Margaret Castor. By the time they got to high school, they were sweethearts. Both were in Muskingum College in New Concord, his mother's alma mater, when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. A short time later, Glenn enrolled in the Naval Aviation Cadet Program and graduated the following March. He joined the Marine Corps in early 1943 and wed his childhood sweetheart on April 6 of that year.

 

Glenn flew 149 combat missions in World War II and the Korean War. In the final nine days of the Korean War, Glenn shot down three MiG fighter jets along the Yalu River. His military service earned him numerous awards, including six Distinguished Flying Crosses.

 

After Korea, Glenn became a test pilot for Naval and Marine aircraft and, in 1957, set the transcontinental air speed record. He flew a Vought F-8 Crusader from Los Angeles to New York in three hours and 23 minutes -- the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed. 

 

With that feat, Glenn became known as one of the top test pilots in the United States and a natural candidate for the country's emerging space program.

 

'The Right Stuff'

 

He eagerly volunteered when NASA requested pilots for its suborbital and orbital programs, and in 1959 he and six others -- Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton -- were selected as the first astronauts, known as the "Mercury 7." Glenn was the last living member of the group.

 

The men instantly became national heroes and media sensations.

 

On February 20, 1962, Glenn rode an Atlas rocket into history as the first American to orbit the Earth. He was the third American in space, behind Shepard and Grissom -- whose missions aboard smaller Redstone rockets were short suborbital flights. The Soviet Union by that time had sent two cosmonauts, Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, on orbital flights.

 

After making three orbits in four hours and 55 minutes, Glenn landed in the waters off Grand Turk Island in the Atlantic Ocean, 800 miles southeast of Bermuda, where he and his Friendship 7 were retrieved by the destroyer USS Noa.

 

Glenn recalled in a Life magazine article a strange phenomenon that occurred during the mission: "There, spread out as far as I could see were literally thousands of tiny luminous objects that glowed in the black sky like fireflies. I was riding slowly through them, and the sensation was like walking backwards through a pasture where someone had waved a wand and made all the fireflies stop right where they were and glow steadily."

 

The flight also featured a glitch that contributed to Glenn's reputation for being cool under fire.

 

Because of an indicator light showing that the Mercury capsule's heat shield was partly detached, mission controllers decided to bring Glenn home early and told him not to jettison his aft retro rockets, which allowed him to maneuver the craft in space. Because the retropack was strapped to the heat shield, it was thought it would provide an extra measure of security.

 

It would later be learned that the heat shield wasn't damaged, but the fiery re-entry was made more spectacular by the scorching retropack in Earth's upper atmosphere. Glenn's first words when he stepped aboard the deck of the USS Noa were, "Boy, that was a real fireball of a ride!"

 

Later in life, Glenn poked fun at the risk. 

 

"We used to joke about it in the past when people would say, 'What do you think on the launch pad?' " he said in a 1998 CNN interview.

 

"And the standard answer was, 'How do you think you'd feel if you knew you were on top of 2 million parts built by the lowest bidder on a government contract?' "

 

Glenn's mission was more than just a round-the-world space journey. It was a psychological boost to a nation worried about the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race.

 

Shortly after landing, Glenn was honored with an enormous ticker tape parade in New York City on March 1, 1962. An estimated 4 million people turned out.

 

His success bolstered America's spirit and gave credence to President John Kennedy's 1961 pledge to put men on the moon. But Glenn would not be one of them.

 

Kennedy reportedly ordered NASA not to fly Glenn again because he was too valuable as a national figure. Glenn resigned from the space agency in January 1964.

 

Political career

 

Glenn's fame made him a natural candidate for political office, and shortly after his resignation from NASA, he announced he would run for the Democratic ticket for a US Senate seat in 1964. But his political career was sidelined for a few years when an injury forced him to withdraw from the campaign.

 

Glenn then joined Royal Crown Cola as a vice president and later as president. Yet he remained interested in politics. He was also a close friend of the Kennedy family. On June 5, 1968, Glenn was with US Sen. Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, hours before Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy died the next day.

 

"Who knows what might have happened if Bobby had been president," Glenn reflected shortly after his 90th birthday, in a 2011 interview with the Dayton Daily News.

 

"I know he had just about more compassion for the underdog, for the poor, the downtrodden than, I think, just about anybody that I ever knew."

 

After a failed bid for a US Senate seat in 1970, Glenn won in 1974, beginning a 24-year career representing Ohio on Capitol Hill. He was widely regarded as an effective legislator and moderate Democrat. He played a key role in weapons control, authoring the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978, which prohibited the sale of nuclear equipment to nations that currently have none.

 

Glenn -- along with fellow Mercury 7 astronauts Grissom and Shepard -- was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978 by then-President Jimmy Carter.

 

More than 20 years after their historic mission, the team was immortalized in the 1983 movie "The Right Stuff." Glenn -- portrayed by Ed Harris -- didn't care much for the film, saying, "I thought it was dramatic enough without Hollywood doing its number on it."

 

Despite his rock-solid reputation as an American icon, not everything went perfectly for Glenn. In 1984, he decided to run for president, confidently declaring, "With the nomination of my part,y I firmly believe I can beat Ronald Reagan."

 

He was knocked out of the primaries early on.

 

A return to space

 

As he grew older, Glenn never gave up his dream of flying in space again or, as he called it in the Mercury days, being "a willing guinea pig."

 

At age 77, a year after retiring from the Senate, Glenn accepted an invitation from NASA to rejoin the space program as a member of space shuttle Discovery on a nine-day mission to study the aging process, which mirrors what astronauts experience during long durations in space.

 

On October 29, 1998, Glenn became the oldest human ever to venture into space, and his flight proved once again that he was a man who embraced a challenge.

 

For most men and women, fame is fleeting and greatness is short-lived. For John Herschel Glenn Jr., it lasted a lifetime.

 

Glenn is survived by his wife of 73 years, Annie; his two children, John David and Carolyn Ann (Lyn); and two grandchildren.

 

John Glenn, American hero, aviation icon and former U.S. senator, dies at 95

 

Joe Hallett - Columbus Dispatch (December 8)

 

Former Sen. John Glenn talks via satellite with the astronauts on the International Space Station in February 2012. In the background is a photo of him in 1962 as he prepared to pilot Friendship 7 around the Earth.

 

His legend is other-worldly and now, at age 95, that's where John Glenn has gone.

 

An authentic hero and genuine American icon, Glenn died this afternoon surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus after a remarkably healthy life spent almost from the cradle with Annie, his beloved wife of 73 years, who survives.

 

He, along with fellow aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright and moon-walker Neil Armstrong, truly made Ohio first in flight.

 

"John Glenn is, and always will be, Ohio's ultimate hometown hero, and his passing today is an occasion for all of us to grieve," said Ohio Gov. John R. Kasich. "As we bow our heads and share our grief with his beloved wife, Annie, we must also turn to the skies, to salute his remarkable journeys and his long years of service to our state and nation.

 

"Though he soared deep into space and to the heights of Capitol Hill, his heart never strayed from his steadfast Ohio roots. Godspeed, John Glenn!" Kasich said.

 

Glenn's body will lie in state at the Ohio Statehouse for a day, and a public memorial service will be held at Ohio State University's Mershon Auditorium. He will be buried near Washington, D.C., at Arlington National Cemetery in a private service. Dates and times for the public events will be announced soon.

 

Glenn lived a Ripley's Believe It or Not! life. As a Marine Corps pilot, he broke the transcontinental flight speed record before being the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 and, 36 years later at age 77 in 1998, becoming the oldest man in space as a member of the seven-astronaut crew of the shuttle Discovery.

 

He made that flight in his 24th and final year in the U.S. Senate, from whence he launched a short-lived bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. Along the way, Glenn became moderately wealthy from an early investment in Holiday Inns near Disney World and a stint as president of Royal Crown International.

 

In one of his last public appearances, Glenn, with Annie by his side, sat in the Port Columbus airport terminal on June 28 as officials renamed it in his honor -- the John Glenn Columbus International Airport.

 

In addition to his world-famous career in aviation and aerospace, Glenn had a relationship with that particular airport that is likely second to none. Glenn, who turned 8 the month that Port Columbus opened in July 1929, recalled asking his parents to stop at the airport so he could watch the planes come and go while he was growing up in New Concord, 70 miles east of Columbus.

 

Glenn recalled "many teary departures and reunions" at the airport's original terminal on Fifth Avenue during his time as a military aviator during World War II. He and his wife Annie, who had been married 73 years, later kept a small Beechcraft plane at Lane Aviation on the airport grounds for many years, and he only gave up flying his own plane at age 90.

 

Privately, this man who had been honored by presidents and immortalized in history books and movies, told friends that for an aviator, seeing his name on the Columbus airport was the highest honor he could imagine.

 

Glenn, who lived with Annie for the past decade in a Downtown Columbus condo, dedicated his life to public service, devoting many of his later years to Ohio State University, which in 2005 converted the century-old Page Hall into the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy and the School of Public Policy and Management. It is now the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

 

"He was very proud of the Glenn College," said Jack Kessler, chairman of the New Albany Company, a former Ohio State trustee and longtime friend of the Glenns. "It's a legacy that will carry on his mission toward good public policy."

 

While Glenn held office as a Democrat, he wasn't partisan, Kessler said. "I never heard him say a bad thing about anyone. Some of his best friends were Republicans, and he could work with anyone."

 

Surrounded by dozens of students striving to earn master's and doctoral degrees from the institute, Glenn said at its dedication, "If we inspire a few young people into careers of public service and politics, this will all be worth it."

 

Remarkably physically fit and energetic, Glenn only began encountering health problems in 2013 when he had a pacemaker implanted and missed some public appearances due to vertigo.

 

In 2011, he and Annie both had knee-replacement surgery, which kept them from repeating a planned road trip like the impromptu 8,400-mile journey throughout the West they took a year earlier in their Cadillac when she was 89 and he 88.

 

Raised in New Concord, where he and Annie both went to Muskingum College, Glenn aspired to be a medical doctor, but World War II sidetracked that ambition and launched a life of uncommon achievement and bravery. At age 8, he took his first ride in an open-cockpit airplane and ended up virtually living life in the sky, continuing to fly until 2011 when he put up for sale the twin-engine Beech Baron he had owned since 1981.

 

"I miss it," Glenn told The Dispatch in 2012 "I never got tired of flying."

 

Glenn flew 149 combat missions in World War II and Korea, where his wingman and eventual lifelong friend was baseball legend Ted Williams. In Korea, Glenn earned the nickname "Old Magnet Ass" due to his skill in landing his airplane under any condition, even after it was riddled with bullets and had blown tires.

 

Born not far from New Concord in Cambridge on July 18, 1921, Glenn and his parents moved about 10 miles west in 1923 to New Concord. His father was a plumber and his mother a teacher who joined a social group called the Twice 5 Club, which got together once a month. Another couple in the club had a daughter, Annie Castor, who was a year older than Glenn, and the two toddlers often shared a playpen while their parents played cards.

 

Their relationship evolved into a quintessential American love story, with the spark between them first igniting when they were in junior high school.

 

"To write a story about either of them, if it doesn't include the other, then it just isn't complete," their daughter, Lyn, told The Dispatch in 2007. She and her brother, David, a California doctor, survive.

 

John and Annie were married on April 6, 1943, and the next January, as they held each other searching for something to say as he prepared to ship out for combat in the South Pacific, John said, "I'm just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum."

 

From that day on, she kept a gum wrapper in her purse. 

To many with disabilities, Annie became a heroine in her own right as she struggled to conquer near-debilitating stuttering.

 

For more than half of her life, she counted on others to speak for her, publicly uncommunicative in a world that demanded more from her as her husband's fame ascended.

 

Through it all, John stood by Annie, who, in 1973, underwent an innovative treatment regimen that dramatically improved her speech to the extent that she was delivering speeches on behalf of her husband's 1984 presidential candidacy.

 

Glenn, who received his pilot's license in 1941, was at home in the sky, soon evident after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he left Muskingum College to enlist in the Marine Air Corps. In the Pacific, he flew 59 missions over the Marshall Islands.

 

After being stationed in China and Guam when World War II ended, Glenn was a flight instructor in Texas before being transferred to Virginia. When the Korean War broke out, Glenn applied for combat duty, and flew 90 missions. Overall, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross six times and was awarded the Air Medal with 18 clusters.

 

After returning from Korea, Glenn became a test pilot. He set a coast-to-coast speed record in 1957, piloting a Navy jet fighter from California to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes. In 1959, he was selected as one of the country's first seven astronauts, a historic group immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff, the basis for a movie of the same name.

 

The United States was enveloped in a cold war with the Soviet Union, and after a series of U.S. rockets had blown up, the American psyche was dealt a blow in 1961 when Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space and the first to orbit Earth.

 

The third American in space after suborbital missions by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, Glenn finally equaled Gagarin's achievement by blasting off on Feb. 20, 1962, after weather and mechanical problems caused his mission to be postponed 10 times.

 

Crammed into the 7-foot-wide Friendship 7 space capsule atop a 100-foot-tall Atlas rocket loaded with 250,000 pounds of explosive fuel, Glenn launched 160-miles into space, orbiting the world three times at 17,500 miles per hour.

 

Reflecting many years later, Glenn would say that computers were the greatest technological achievement during his life, but there were none on Friendship 7, and deep into the flight he had to take manual control of the capsule when systems malfunctioned.

 

As the capsule descended for a watery landing, mission control feared that its heat shield was peeling off. Well past four hours into the flight, Glenn was told of the problem and knew he could be burned alive in an instant (Annie was notified to expect the worst), but the astronaut stayed focused even as fiery pieces of his spacecraft flew by his window.

 

"You didn't really have time to think about it," he told students at COSI Columbus 45 years later. "Long before you actually got to the flight itself, you sort of made peace with mortality."

 

Safely splashing in the Atlantic Ocean 800 miles southeast of Bermuda, Glenn's historic flight invigorated the nation and catapulted him into American lore. He addressed a joint session of Congress and rode in a convertible with Annie as 4 million people cheered him in a Manhattan ticker-tape parade.

 

In 2007, 45 years after his historic orbital mission, Glenn told a Columbus audience how much he longed to return to space right away, only to learn years after leaving the space program that President John F. Kennedy, fearing the worst, secretly had barred him from other flights to spare the country the potential loss of a national hero.

 

Glenn admitted in that speech that he was jealous in 1969 when fellow Ohioan Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon.

 

In 1964, only two years after his famous flight on Friendship 7, Glenn ran in the Democratic Senate primary against incumbent Sen. Stephen M. Young. But only six weeks after announcing his candidacy, Glenn dropped out of the race after damaging his inner ear in a bathroom fall, an injury that caused severe dizziness and balance problems. He recovered eight months later.

 

Glenn ran for the Senate again in 1970, but lost in the primary to Howard M. Metzenbaum, whom he defeated in a rematch four years later. He handily won election that fall over Cleveland Mayor Ralph Perk and won re-election by huge margins in 1980 and 1986.

 

After winning re-election in 1980 by the largest margin in Ohio history, Glenn ran for president in 1984. He was seen as the leading challenger to former Vice President Walter F. Mondale for the Democratic nomination, and was the candidate many considered to have the best chance of defeating President Ronald Reagan in the general election.

 

But plagued by a disorganized campaign and with a centrist theme ill-suited to a liberal-dominated Democratic primary process, Glenn finished back in the pack in the important Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. He borrowed $2 million to compete in the Southern primaries, but he didn't win a state and dropped out of the race.

 

The debt remaining from that race, which rose to more than $3 million, became a campaign issue for Glenn in subsequent Senate races and nagged him until 2006 when the Federal Elections Commission finally allowed him to close the books on it after years of chipping away.

 

The third term of his four in the Senate was dominated by a Senate investigation into allegations that he improperly interceded with S&L regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, who had raised or donated $242,000 to Glenn's political committees. Glenn personally spent more than $500,000 to defend his honor, and the Senate Ethics Committee cleared him of wrongdoing.

 

"I spend half a million dollars on my defense, and I wouldn't pull back a penny of it," Glenn said then. "The reason I felt so strongly about it was that it involved my honor, and if I had to sell everything I had and mortgaged the house, I would have done everything I could to see the truth come out."

 

In his final year as a U.S. senator in 1998, Glenn was reborn as an astronaut. At 77, he orbited the Earth with six astronauts aboard shuttle Discovery, once again rendering his body and mind to the study of science, providing insight into how the oldest man ever launched into space held up. Glenn, remarkably fit, became an inspiration once again to mankind.

 

The events of John Glenn's life, and his footprint on history, are chronicled in countless books and beyond. The Friendship 7 capsule is in the Smithsonian, his papers and memorabilia are archived at Ohio State, and his life with Annie — and much more — are displayed at the Glenn Historic Site in New Concord.

 

10 Things to Know About John Glenn, Who Has Died at 95

 

Seth Borenstein - Associated Press

 

Ten notable aspects of the life of astronaut and Senator John H. Glenn Jr. who died Thursday at 95:

 

———

 

ENDURING MARRIAGE

 

Glenn married his childhood sweetheart, Anna "Annie" Margaret Castor, in 1943. She survives him. He bought her a diamond engagement ring in 1942 for $125 and it was never replaced.

 

———

 

FIGHTER PILOT

 

John Glenn was a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean conflict, flying 149 missions. He flew with baseball legend Ted Williams and his plane was riddled with bullets when he flew at low altitude.

 

———

 

TEST PILOT

 

As a military test pilot in 1957, Glenn broke the transcontinental air speed record, bursting from Los Angeles to New York City in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds. His Crusader jet averaged 725 miles per hour.

 

———

 

FIRST AMERICAN TO ORBIT EARTH

 

Glenn went into orbit on Friendship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962, but the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit Earth and Alan Shephard was the first American in space, on a sub-orbital mission.

 

———

 

IN THE CANYON OF HEROES

 

A total of 3,474 tons of paper were swept up after Glenn's ticker tape parade in New York in March of 1962 — more than any parade since the one marking the end of World War II.

 

———

 

TOO IMPORTANT TO FLY?

 

It has been said that President John F. Kennedy felt he could not risk sending Glenn into space a second time. Said Glenn in a 1995 interview: "Kennedy had indicated to NASA that he would just as soon that I was not assigned to another flight. Now, whether it was because of the impact if I got killed on the second flight would that reflect politically, I never knew."

 

———

 

LONGTIME SENATOR

 

A Democrat, Glenn was Ohio's longest serving senator, serving just a bit more than 24 years until 1999. But that was only after two earlier attempts. In 1964, he had to stop his campaign after he hit his head in a bathtub accident, and he lost the Democratic primary in 1970.

 

———

 

HAT IN THE ULTIMATE RING

 

Glenn ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 but lost in the primaries to former Vice President Walter Mondale.

 

———

 

OLDEST MAN IN SPACE

 

Glenn returned to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998 at age 77. He was the subject of experiments on geriatrics and microgravity.

 

———

 

LAST OF HIS KIND:

 

Glenn was the last surviving member of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. Five hundred forty-six people flew in orbit after Glenn, only two before: Gagarin and Gherman Titov.

 

END

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