Who is John Glenn?

For several generations, John Glenn was the senior senator from the state of Ohio-known for his traditional Democratic views, more liberal than middle of the road. He spent a long time in the Senate and was a permanent fixture there until his retirement. But, of course, he is not a hero for being a senator-sadly, there are far too few senators anyone would consider heroes.

He is a hero because he was a pioneer in the new field of jet airplanes and space missions. What was it about a man that he would let himself be strapped into an experimental jet airplane and test it at two or three times the speed of sound? What is the internal mechanism that drives a man to want-to fight-to be hurled from the face of Earth as part of the exploration of space?

In many ways, he is no different than earlier explorers who risked their lives and fortunes to do something that no one had ever attempted before. He is our hero because he was driven to repeat history and explore where few had gone before. He is our hero because he came back alive each time and made us feel special about what he had accomplished. And he was our hero because he gave us great pride in our country and its space endeavors.

What made him Astronaut?

In many ways, John Herschel Glenn Jr., was the ail-American man. He was born in 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio, and grew up in Cambridge and New Concord, Ohio. He wrote that his childhood was everything a boy could dream of and he flourished as a student.

After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Muskingum College, Glenn decided to enter the military. This was during the early years of World War II, and Glenn was attracted to military aviation. He enrolled in the Naval Aviation Program in 1942 and was later assigned to the Marines’ VMO-155 group in 1944. Glenn flew bombing missions over the Marshall Islands in the Pacific later in the war, and by the time the war ended, had been promoted to captain and stationed at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River. By then he had married his childhood sweetheart, Anna Margaret Castor. He would later have two children with her.

Glenn was a flight instructor in the late 1940s, but he longed to get back into combat, this time in the burgeoning Korean War. He finally got his wish and went to Korea as part of Marine Corps squadron VMF- 311. An interesting bit of trivia is that Glenn’s frequent wingman during this time was baseball all-star Ted Williams.

“After Glenn flew in an interservice program, he shot down three MiGs while flying an Air Force F-86 Sabre and was decorated for this.”

The next step toward being an astronaut was Glenn’s acceptance into the test pilot school after the Korean War. Although he flew many significant test flights, his early claim to fame was completing the first supersonic transcontinental flight. When he flew over his hometown, the resulting sonic boom had a neighbor running to Glenn’s house shouting,

Around this time, the United States was scrambling to match the USSR in the space race. The Soviets had already orbited a satellite called Sputnik and sent animals into orbit. They would shortly send Yuri Gagarin into orbit as the first man to enter space. The new National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, was desperate to catch up, and from hundreds of applicants chose seven test pilots as the Mercury astronauts. This group included John Glenn.

After suborbital flights by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, Glenn blasted off on February 20, 1962, aboard the Friendship 7 for America’s first manned orbital mission. His flight was not without problems. A malfunction of the automatic attitude control of the capsule forced Glenn to use manual thrusters to maintain a proper position, making him possibly the first man actually to fly in space.

A more significant problem that cut the mission short after only three orbits involved a loose heat shield. The shield was designed to prevent the capsule from burning up by the intense heat of re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. NASA ground controllers, afraid that the shield would fall off during re-entry, told Glenn to keep the retrorocket thruster pack attached below the heat shield, in the hope that the belts securing the pack would hold the shield on. The maneuver worked, and John Glenn splashed down to become a national hero.

A few weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Glenn resigned from NASA and entered the business world. He was also interested in running for elected office in Ohio and started exploring the possibility of running against Ohio incumbent, U.S. Senator Stephen M. Young. A household injury forced Glenn to pull out of the race. He lost a primary battle in 1970, but won the primary and the general election for U.S. Senate in 1974.

Glenn served with honor in the Senate and was the chief author of the 1978 Nonproliferation Act. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for president in 1984. However, his record was stained when he was included as part of the Keating Five after accepting a $200,000 contribution from a man partly responsible for the savings and loan collapses of the late 1980s. Glenn was exonerated and was found only to have exercised poor judgment. He repeatedly won re-election, finally retiring from politics in 1999-

In 1998, Glenn returned to space as a controversial part of the space shuttle Discovery STS-95 mission. Glenn was there ostensibly to help NASA see how space travel would affect the elderly, but many critics saw it as a publicity stunt. The public loved it, however, and gave Glenn and the rest of the crew a ticker-tape parade, making him one of the few individuals to be the recipient of two ticker-tape parades.

The Legacy of John Glenn

John Glenn remains one of America’s most beloved heroes. He was most famously portrayed by Ed Harris in the film The Right Stuff.

Besides his personal achievements, Glenn has lent his name to the NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio. The highway running by the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University near Dayton, Ohio, is named the Colonel Glenn Highway.

After leaving elected office, Glenn helped create the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy-later to be called the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University-where he still works as an adjunct professor of political science to further the institute’s efforts to promote working in public service.

No matter his current activities, Glenn will live on as a dedicated public servant and daring space traveler who overcame mechanical problems with his spaceship to return safely to Earth and maintain NASA’s steady progress in landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s.

Courtesy

You can find the official biography of John Glenn and related information about his two space missions at www.nasa.gov.The film The Right Stuff is an entertaining look at the Mercury program. The book by the same name by Tom Wolfe, Bantam Reissue Press, 1983, is more detailed.

Other good books on Glenn include John Glenn: A Memoir, Bantam, 2000John Glenn: A Space Biography (Countdown to Space), Enslow Publishing, 1998; Back in Orbit: John Glenn’s Return to Space, Longstreet Press, 1998; and A Hero Born, Poet Born Press, 1999.