#john glenn
Relaxing after the mission. Astronaut John Glenn kicks back following his historic Project Mercury flight to become the 1st American to orbit the globe. His 5 hour flight in Feb ‘62 orbited Earth 3x before splashdown. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was both the 1st human in space & to orbit the globe in his Vostok craft in April ‘61. Glenn continued his NASA career to accomplish the formidable feat of being the oldest in space, at that time, at 77 years of age during a Space Shuttle Discovery flight in 1995; a true space pioneer & legend.
The Mercury Capsules that took John Glenn, Friendship 7 bottom, and Alan Shepard, Freedom 7 top, to space with Alan Shepard being the first American and Second person in space and John Glenn being the first to orbit the Earth. True American Hero’s that helped us change our future.
On February 20th 1962, Col. John Glenn piloted the Mercury Friendship 7 spacecraft in the first United States human-orbital flight.
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Amy Shira Teitel’s fascinating nonfiction debut is an excellent companion to Michael Chabon’s recent novel Moonglow and Theodore Melfi’s film Hidden Figures—which hits theaters tomorrow!
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John Glenn, the World’s First Astronaut!
Yesterday the world received the sad news of the death of the very first astronaut, John Glenn. Yes, yes, Yuri Gagarin beat us Americans and speakers of English into space, but Gagarin was the world’s first cosmonaut! A small, nit-picky distinction that only a word nerd would make, but this blog is all about words, so the distinction matters. AstronautJohn Glenn piloted the Friendship 7 spacecraft in February of 1962 as part of the Mercury program, a significant American technological milestone that represents one of the few words in the English language to move from pure theoretical abstraction to concrete reality in a single day.
While humans have been dreaming of flight since the dawn of time, it wasn’t until the turn of the nineteenth century that the Wright brothers achieved that magical 59 second flight covering 852 feet, skimming over the beach not more than twenty feet off the ground. The new science of flight and aeronautics was born and after thousands of years of dreaming about flight, it only took another two and a half decades to coin the term astronautand set the bar higher for flight. A combination of two Ancient Greek words astermeaningstarandnautesmeaning a sailor, an astronautwasa sailor of stars.
On April 9, 1959, the word took on a new meaning when NASA announced the first seven American astronauts: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. These seven men would become known as the Mercury Seven. More than simply a new word though, these early pioneers of both space and technology became heroes of popular imagination. They inspired generations of young boys and girls into science and technology and the technology derived from the space program has enriched our everyday lives from breakfast foods to automobile safety.
John Glenn was the most famous and prominent member of the Mercury program and he would go on to a long career in the Senate and returned to space at the age of 77 with the Shuttle program. A pioneer from the beginning of his career to the end!
Image of the John Glenn and the Mercury 7 astronauts courtesy NASA.
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60 years ago today, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth: “I got in on this project because it was probably the nearest to heaven I’ll ever get, and I wanted to make the most of it.”
