GLENN, JOHN H(ERSCHEL), JR.

born , July 18, 1921, Cambridge, Ohio, U.S. American astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr., and the space capsule Friendship 7. the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth (1962). Glenn joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1943 and flew 59 missions during World War II and 90 missions during the Korean War. He was a test pilot from 1954 and in 1959 was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Of the seven astronauts selected in that year for Project Mercury space-flight training, he was the oldest. Glenn served as a backup pilot for Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Virgil I. Grissom, who made the first two U.S. suborbital flights into space. Glenn was selected for the first orbital flight, and on Feb. 20, 1962, his space capsule, Friendship 7, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its orbit ranged from approximately 99 to 162 miles (159 to 261 kilometres) in altitude, and Glenn made three orbits, landing in the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas. Glenn retired from the space program and the Marine Corps in 1964 to enter private business and to pursue his interest in politics. In 1970 he sought the nomination as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, losing narrowly in the primary. He was elected U.S. senator from that state in 1974 and was reelected three times thereafter. Glenn was unsuccessful, however, in his bid to become the 1984 Democratic presidential candidate. In 1998 Glenn returned to space as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle mission STS-95, which lasted from October 29 to November 7. The oldest person ever to travel in space, Glenn participated in experiments designed to study similarities between the process of aging and the body's adaptation to weightlessness.