John Glenn

NASA career

In 1958 John Glenn joined NASA as one of the original group of astronauts for Project Mercury, and flew the first American manned orbital mission termed Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. He completed three orbits, the Mercury 6 mission, lasting 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. As a result, he became a national hero, and received a ticker-tape parade reminiscent of Charles Lindbergh. He also became a personal friend of the Kennedy family, and was the one chosen by Jackie Kennedy to break the news to the Kennedy children of what had happened to their father on November 22, 1963.

NASA management considered Glenn too valuable a PR asset to risk on another spaceflight and in 1962 he was moved to the Apollo program office and not selected for a flight in the Gemini program. Glenn worked for NASA until 1964 and tried to use his influence to talk up additional use of the Mercury program with no success. After NASA, he entered the business world as an executive in Royal Crown Cola.

Glenn lifted off for a second space flight on October 29, 1998, on Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-95 mission in order to study the effects of space flight on the elderly. His age of 77 made him the oldest person ever to go into space. Glenn's presence on the nine-day mission was widely criticized by many in the space community as an expensive junket for one of NASA's Congressional supporters, but was also justified by others as research into the varying effects of weightlessness and other conditions of space flight on the same person at two points in life thirty-five years apart, which is by far the farthest interval which has ever separated mutiple space flights by the same person. Upon their return, Glenn (and his crewmates) received another ticker-tape parade, making him the ninth (and, as of 2004, final) person to have ever received multiple ticker-tape parades in his own honor (as opposed to that of his sports team).

The NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio, is named after him.

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