John Glenn

John Glenn: The Man NASA Chose Twice

John Glenn flew into orbit in a capsule the size of a phone booth in 1962, and returned to space thirty-six years later on the shuttle Discovery, at age seventy-seven, as the oldest human being ever to leave Earth's atmosphere. Between those two flights he served four terms in the United States Senate, ran for president, and was investigated by his own chamber's ethics committee — a life so improbably layered that Tom Wolfe, writing about the original Mercury astronauts, simply concluded Glenn was "the lone Marine" who came out on top of them all.

Ohio Beginnings

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on 18 July 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio, and raised in nearby New Concord by a plumbing-business father and schoolteacher mother. His first airplane ride, at age eight, set the direction for the rest of his life. He studied chemistry at Muskingum College starting in 1939 and earned a private pilot's license through the Civilian Pilot Training Program in 1941, just as the country was heading toward war.

Two Wars and Three MiGs in Ten Days

Glenn enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and transferred to the Marine Corps, flying 57 combat missions in Corsairs over the Marshall Islands during World War II and earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses. He stayed in uniform through the Chinese Civil War's aftermath and then Korea, where he flew 63 combat missions in F9F Panthers — absorbing enough flak damage to earn the nickname "Magnet Ass" — before an exchange posting to the Air Force's 25th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. There, flying F-86 Sabres between 12 and 22 July 1953, he shot down three MiG-15s in the war's final days. By the time he left combat flying, Glenn had earned six Distinguished Flying Crosses and eighteen Air Medals across two wars.

The Fastest Man Across America

After Korea, Glenn trained as a test pilot at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, graduating in 1954. On 16 July 1957 he piloted an F8U Crusader 2,445 miles from Los Alamitos, California, to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8.3 seconds — the first supersonic transcontinental flight — while an onboard camera captured the first continuous panoramic photograph of the United States. It made him a minor celebrity two years before NASA existed in its modern form, and it was almost certainly what put him on the short list when the space agency went looking for its first astronauts.

Friendship 7

Selected in April 1959 as one of the Mercury Seven, Glenn became, on 20 February 1962, the first American to orbit the Earth, flying Mercury-Atlas 6 aboard the capsule Friendship 7. He circled the planet three times in four hours and fifty-five minutes, at roughly 17,500 miles per hour, while ground controllers worried — wrongly, as it turned out to be a faulty sensor — that his heat shield had come loose and might fail on re-entry. He splashed down safely 800 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral, was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal within three days, and received a ticker-tape parade that newspapers compared to Charles Lindbergh's. President Kennedy called him a national hero. Glenn resigned from NASA in January 1964 and announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate the same day.

Twenty-Five Years in the Senate

After two failed campaigns — one derailed by a concussion, the other simply lost — Glenn finally won an Ohio Senate seat in 1974 and served until 1999, chairing the Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1987 to 1995. He authored the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978, investigated safety failures at nuclear weapons facilities including the Fernald plant, and pushed through legislation creating inspector general offices across federal agencies. His 1984 presidential run collapsed after poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, leaving him more than $3 million in campaign debt that took over two decades to pay off. In 1990 he was one of five senators investigated in the Keating Five affair over campaign contributions tied to the savings-and-loan crisis; the Senate Ethics Committee found he had exercised "poor judgment," a verdict that cost him half a million dollars in legal fees but stopped short of formal sanction.

Back to Orbit at Seventy-Seven

On 29 October 1998, Glenn returned to space aboard Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-95, becoming both the oldest person to orbit the Earth and the only astronaut to fly in the Mercury and Shuttle programs. NASA and the National Institute on Aging used the nine-day mission to study age-related physiological changes in spaceflight — bone density, muscle mass, blood plasma — turning Glenn himself into a research subject for questions his own 1962 flight had helped make askable. He received a second ticker-tape parade on his return, thirty-six years after his first.

Why John Is Called a Genius

John Glenn was never described, by himself or by NASA, as an intellectual genius in the manner of an Einstein or a Feynman; his gift was a rarer and more physical form of excellence — the nerve and precision of an elite test pilot, married to an unusually calm, quotable public presence that made him, in Tom Wolfe's account, "the most quotable, the most photogenic" of the original seven astronauts even among men selected for exactly those qualities. Flying three combat tours across two wars, setting a transcontinental speed record, and then strapping into an untested capsule atop a rocket with a documented history of exploding on the pad required a specific talent: the ability to execute complex procedures precisely while managing extreme physical risk and public scrutiny simultaneously, without the luxury of panic.

The honest counter-case is straightforward: Glenn did not design Friendship 7, did not calculate its trajectory, and was, by his own account and NASA's, a skilled operator of systems built by thousands of engineers and scientists rather than a scientific mind in his own right. His Senate record, similarly, was solid rather than transformative, and the Keating Five episode left a permanent mark of poor judgment on an otherwise heroic reputation. What made Glenn extraordinary was not raw intellect but an unusual convergence of physical courage, discipline under pressure, and the public trust those qualities earned him — trust that translated, twice, into a nation watching him leave the Earth.

Legacy

Glenn died on 8 December 2016 at age 95, the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven, having remained married to his wife Annie for 73 years. He lay in state at the Ohio Statehouse before burial at Arlington National Cemetery, and President Obama's tribute captured the arc of his life plainly: that Glenn "reminded us that with courage and a spirit of discovery there's no limit to the heights we can reach together."

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 2012
• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at Muskingum University and United States Naval Test Pilot School
• Worked as politician, military officer and test pilot