🇺🇸John
Glenn

John Herschel Glenn Jr. grew up in New Concord, Ohio, in a household where the radio was always on and the news was always serious, and where people did what they said they were going to do. He was born on July 18, 1921, the son of a plumber who ran a hardware store and a mother who taught school. New Concord was the kind of small Midwestern town where everyone knew everyone's business and character was considered more important than success — a place where the two were expected to coincide. Glenn absorbed this idea entirely. He was studious, honest, churchgoing, and fiercely competitive, a boy who built model airplanes and dreamed of flight before he had any realistic path to it. He was in his second year of college at Muskingum University when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He was in the air within a year.

Glenn flew 59 combat missions in World War II and 90 more in Korea, earning six Distinguished Flying Crosses and earning the nickname "Magnet Ass" from fellow pilots for his ability to attract enemy fire and survive it. He was a pilot of extraordinary gifts and almost supernatural calm under fire: his wingman in Korea was Ted Williams, the baseball Hall of Famer, who flew alongside Glenn and later said he was the best pilot he had ever known. After Korea, Glenn became a test pilot and on July 16, 1957, set a transcontinental speed record, flying from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes, and 8 seconds — the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed throughout. He appeared on the television game show "Name That Tune" and won $25,000. He was that kind of American: exceptional at everything, approachable about all of it.

NASA selected Glenn as one of the Mercury Seven in 1959. He was the most famous of the group before any of them had flown in space, which created tensions he managed with his characteristic steady good humor. He was originally scheduled to orbit before Alan Shepard's suborbital flight, but was reassigned when the program timeline shifted. After Shepard and Gus Grissom made their suborbital flights in 1961, Glenn was assigned to Friendship 7 — the mission that would make him the first American to orbit Earth. The launch was scrubbed ten times over three months for weather and technical problems. On February 20, 1962, after a final hold of four hours and thirteen minutes to fix a fuel valve, the Atlas rocket finally ignited and Glenn was on his way.

The Friendship 7 mission lasted 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. Glenn completed three orbits of the Earth, reaching a maximum altitude of 162 miles and a speed of 17,544 miles per hour. From the window of the capsule, he described what he saw with a journalist's precision: the vivid blue of the atmosphere against the blackness of space, the sharp terminator line between day and night, the way the stars didn't twinkle in the vacuum, and — most memorably — what he called "fireflies," luminous particles that surrounded the capsule in the darkness and that were later determined to be ice crystals from the attitude-control thruster vents catching sunlight. The mission nearly ended in disaster when telemetry indicated that the heat shield securing bolts had loosened, which would have meant incineration on re-entry. Glenn was told to keep his retropacket bag attached over the heat shield to hold it in place. He came home and it turned out to be a faulty sensor reading. The heat shield was fine. He always said he hadn't been scared.

Glenn's return to Earth was met with a ticker-tape parade in New York City, a joint session of Congress, and the kind of national adulation that America reserves for a particular kind of hero: one who combined technical excellence with moral clarity and personal warmth in proportions the country found exactly right. President Kennedy was so worried about losing Glenn in an accident that he quietly removed him from consideration for further spaceflights. Glenn resigned from NASA in 1964. He ran for the US Senate from Ohio in 1970 and lost; ran again in 1974 and won. He served four terms, became a respected voice on defense and foreign policy, and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. He was a better senator than a presidential candidate, which is not a common sentence to write.

In 1998, at age seventy-seven, Glenn lobbied NASA to fly again — arguing, not entirely unreasonably, that the physiological effects of spaceflight on older bodies were scientifically worth studying. NASA agreed. On October 29, 1998, he launched aboard Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-95, becoming the oldest person ever to fly in space. He spent nine days in orbit, participated in experiments on aging, and looked out the window at the same Earth he had first seen from orbit thirty-six years before. He said it was still beautiful. He died on December 8, 2016, at the age of ninety-five, the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven. His body lay in repose at the Ohio Statehouse, and President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling him "a true American hero."