John Glenn, First American to Orbit Earth, Dies at Age 95
Astronaut later served four terms as Democratic senator from Ohio
By JAMES R. HAGERTY and KRIS MAHER
Updated Dec. 8, 2016 6:47 p.m. ET
At a time of angst over the Soviet Union’s early lead in space exploration, John Glenn made America a shot of self-confidence on Feb. 20, 1962, when his space capsule circled the Earth three times and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Mr. Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and a four-term U.S. senator, died Thursday at the James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95 years old.
On his return from that 1962 flight, he was greeted as no American had been since Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic 35 years before. “Welcome to Earth” read one banner lining his route back to Cape Canaveral, Fla. The clean-cut astronaut was feted at the White House and in parades across the U.S. The blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins recorded “Happy Blues for John Glenn.”
The flight of the Mercury Friendship 7 evened the score with the Soviet Union in the so-called Space Race, an offshoot of the Cold War that culminated with the U.S. moon landing in 1969.
Mr. Glenn resigned from NASA on Jan. 16, 1964, and he retired from the Marine Corps a year later. Running as a Democrat from Ohio, he won election to the Senate in 1974 and served until Jan. 3, 1999.
In 1998, when he was 77 years old, he rode the space shuttle, becoming the oldest person ever to blast into space. In 2012, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“When John Glenn blasted off from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas rocket in 1962, he lifted the hopes of a nation,” President Barack Obama said Thursday.
President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, “Today we lost a great pioneer of air and space in John Glenn. He was a hero and inspired generations of future explorers.”
Speaking to NASA employees after his orbital flight, Mr. Glenn was modest: “I’m getting the attention for all the thousands of you who worked on it.”
John Herschel Glenn Jr., a lifelong Presbyterian, was born July 18, 1921, and raised in the small Ohio town of New Concord. In 1943, he married his high-school sweetheart, Anna Margaret Castor, who attended nearby Muskingum College with him. Mr. Glenn dropped out to join the military after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he eventually became a pilot in the Marine Corps.
During World War II, he flew 59 combat missions in the South Pacific, and after the war he became a flight instructor. He flew 90 combat missions during the Korean War and won the nickname “magnet ass” for his propensity to attract enemy flak.
As a test pilot, Mr. Glenn in 1957 set a record for transcontinental flight, taking three hours and 23 minutes to fly from Los Alamitos, Calif., to Floyd Bennett Field in New York City. That marked the first supersonic transcontinental flight.
He was selected as one of the Mercury Seven, test pilots who trained to be the first Americans in space. He spent time in a giant centrifuge to experience high G-forces as a human guinea pig for the rigors of space travel.
At the time, the U.S.- Soviet rivalry included a race to explore space. Mr. Glenn hoped to be the first up, but that leg of the race was won by the Soviets when Yuri Gargarin orbited the Earth in 1961. Later that year, astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom became the first Americans to visit space in brief, suborbital flights.
It fell to Mr. Glenn, after several scrubbed missions, to make America’s first orbital flight. Despite its relative brevity—three orbits in about five hours—Mr. Glenn’s flight and his stolid demeanor made him the iconic representative of the early U.S. space program.
His words as he circled the Earth and registered his awe became widely quoted. “Zero-g and I feel fine,” Mr. Glenn said. “Oh, that view is tremendous.”
As a senator, Mr. Glenn was noted for his interest in military issues. In 1984, he failed in an attempt to win the Democratic presidential nomination as voters found little excitement in his pitch for the “sensible center” of moderation. He called for income-tax increases to shrink the budget deficit and promised: “The programs we propose will be moderate programs that will provide a balance between competing interests in our society.”
He is survived by his wife, a son, a daughter, two grandsons and a great grandson.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com and Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com
