John Glenn
Colonel John Glenn was a 23-year Marine Corps vet with over 140 combat missions across two wars and a handful of confirmed kills on MiG jet aircraft, a United States Senator, the first American to orbit earth and also, 36 years later, the oldest person to ever undertake spaceflight. He logged nearly 10,000 flight hours in his life, survived being shot by AA guns twelve times, was once on an episode of Frazier, and Ed Harris played him in a movie once, which is pretty dope. He passed away three years ago this month, the last of the Mercury Seven astronauts, and seeing as how I wrote an entire book about the Space Program it seems really negligent of me to not have written about him at some point in the last 15 years.
I promise I am not going to make some lame attempt to sneak the phrase "the Right Stuff" into this article even though apparently every writer on earth is contractually obligated to do this for some reason.
Glenn was born on July 18, 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio. He grew up during the Depression in some little town with like 2000 people in it, where his dad ran a plumbing supply store and his mom was a schoolteacher. He graduated high school in 1939, where he was an honor student, a stud football and basketball player, and was so rad that the school is named after him now. He went to college for a bit, but after the Japanese dropped a few thousand bombs on Hawaii John Glenn immediately enlisted in the Marine Corps, headed to the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, and became a badass fighter pilot.
From the cockpit of an F-4U Corsair, Glenn flew 59 combat missions over the Pacific, including one stretch where he piloted 20 combat missions in just 9 days over heavily-defended enemy airspace above the Marshall Islands. He received his first two Distinguished Flying Crosses for heroism under fire as he helped blast apart Japanese defenses and cleared the way for the American takeover of the Marshalls. After WWII he served as a flight instructor in Texas, completed Amphibious Warfare Training in Quantico, and then went right back into the middle of things when war broke out in Korea a few years later. Flying F9F Panthers and F-86 Sabres, Glenn survived 90 combat missions throughout the war, including a 9-day span of fighting above the Yalu River that earned him three air-to-air kills on enemy MiG-15s. In the first instance, Glenn took a three-man element up against a swarm of 8 MiGs and end up blasting one of them apart with guns from 100 feet away (which is very close when you are talking about a jet fighter with a combat speed of roughly 600 miles per hour), and then, just two days later, Glenn's wingman took a hit and Glenn spun back around and single-handedly charged six more MiGs that were coming to pick the wingman off. Glenn shot down one of the MiGs, drove the rest away, and got his wingman back to base safely. Each of these actions earned him another Distinguished Flying Cross.
Restored F-86 Sabre with the markings of Glenn’s aircraft from the Korean War on it.
The text says “MiG Mad Marine”
After Korea, Glenn moved toe Maryland and started working with the United States Navy Test Pilot School. He served in the Fighter Design Branch of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, helping test out hardcore and super-dangerous new designs of fighter aircraft, and when he wasn't risking life and limb screaming through the air at never-before-achieved speeds, he also found time to get a degree from the University of Maryland and win $25,000 on the TV game show Name That Tune.
On July 16, 1957, Glenn set a speed record for the fastest travel between New York and L.A., when he boarded an F-8U Crusader jet, climbed it up to 30,000 feet, and blasted full afterburn, reaching a speed of 725 miles an hour – the sonic booms rattled windows and alarmed civilians from Indianapolis to Denver as Glenn rocketed through the skies, making the journey in a then-unbelievable 3 hours and 23 minutes. The mission, which Glenn named Project BULLET (because he was literally traveling faster than a .45-caliber round from his standard-issue Colt M1911 service pistol) was a success, and earned Glenn not only another Distinguished Flying Cross to throw on the pile, but also proved that he was balls-out enough to participate in a new, top-secret project that was somehow even more insane than the shit he was already doing:
Project Mercury. The American plan to strap a dude onto the end of a nuclear missile and launch him into space.
In 1959 Glenn headed to Texas, where he underwent some pretty grueling training that was hardcore even for a dude who made a living at Mach 1 and had grown pretty comfortable with the concept of angry Asian dudes trying to blow his ass up with Flak cannons. He was the alternate pilot on the missions that made Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom the first two Americans in Space, but then in 1962 he finally got the call to action.
On February 20, 1962, 40-year old Marine Corps Colonel John Glenn crammed himself into the cockpit of Mercury capsule Friendship 7 and strapped in. The capsule was situated atop a gigantic Atlas rocket – a seven-story-tall explosive that was originally designed to launch ICBM nukes at Moscow and, according to the DoD, had an "85% reliability rate" – and was launched into orbit by 34,000 pounds of thrust that slammed him with 7 G's on takeoff. The mission was clear – become the first American to orbit the Earth, and, while you're up there, flip off the Auto-Pilot controls for a few minutes and figure out how difficult it would be to control a spaceship manually while you're hurtling 134 nautical miles above the ground at 17,000 miles per hour.
That mission became a bit more intense when Glenn entered orbit, because the freaking auto-pilot failed on him so he literally had nothing else to do EXCEPT manually control this thing. In true badass astronaut fashion, Glenn didn't even blink – he later said, "The malfunction just forced me to prove very rapidly what had been planned over a longer period of time," and went about his mission of manually piloting a spaceship from zero-g, which, up until this point in history, was a thing that had never been attempted by another astronaut before.
Then, a few hours later, ANOTHER error message flashed, and this one was even worse than the first – apparently the heat shield had malfunctioned, and now there was the very real possibility that Glenn and Friendship 7 were going to burn up in the atmosphere during re-entry and be incinerated in a fireball… which, while pretty badass, was really not an ideal way to end this mission. Glenn, again, took things in stride – he basically just said to himself, well, you're either going to die or you aren't, and there's nothing you can do about it, so there's no point in worrying about things that are outside of your control.
Now, I'll do a whole BotW entry on Katherine Johnson and the team that helped get Glenn down from space at some point, but from the cockpit all John Glenn could do was man the flight stick and try and manually (!) bring Freedom 7 in from orbit. Pulling crazy amounts of force, and without the ability to radio-communicate with NASA headquarters during re-entry, Glenn gritted his teeth as chunks of burning metal whizzed past the cockpit window and a set of metal buckles came loose and started banging against the side of the ship. With outside temperatures in excess of 9,500 degrees, the entire thing shaking, and all of America watching on TV or listening on the radio, Glenn steered the capsule towards earth, holding his breath and praying that he didn't spontaneously combust at any moment.
With a huge sigh of relief, he passed through re-entry, and the parachutes deployed above the Freedom 7. Alan Shepard came on the radio and asked Glenn about his condition. Glenn replied, “My condition is good, but that was a real fireball, boy.”
JFK met Glenn when he returned to the USA, and the Mercury Seven all received a huge tickertape parade down the streets of New York City. People all across the States were lauding him as a hero – a real-life pioneer taking the first steps towards exploring the vastness of space.
"It made for a very spectacular re-entry from where I was sitting."
Colonel John Glenn retired from the US Marine Corps in 1964 after 23 years of service. All told, he had logged over 9,000 hours of flight time, including 3,000 in jets and 5 hours in outer space, where he performed 3 full orbits of the earth. He'd flown 149 combat missions across two wars, where he recorded at least three confirmed kills and survived being hit by anti-aircraft fire on twelve separate occasions. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross six times, the Air Medal nineteen times (!), the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Space Medal of Honor (which is an awesome name for a medal).
Bobby Kennedy eventually convinced John Glenn to run for public office, so he ran for senate in 1964. He lost, and then lost again in 1970, but finally won by a landslide in 1974, when he won every single one of Ohio's 88 counties. He served four terms of congress, making him the first Ohio senator to ever serve four times in a row, and was a well-respected member of the US government for 24 years. I don't talk a lot about politics on the website, but he was the chief author of the 1978 Nuclear Nonproliferation Act with Russia, encouraged kids to get involved in government, and created the Department of Veterans' Affairs, and all of that seems pretty universally rad regardless of which side of the aisle you think is Hitler.
Glenn still wanted to fly, however, and every single year he sent a copy of his physical exams to NASA with a letter asking to go back into space (at age 75 he could still do 75 push-ups in a row, which is something I'm not sure I could do when I was 18). He was really bummed he missed out on the Apollo program, but, then, in 1998, at the age of 77 years old, he finally got the call – he was going to be on STS-95, blasting off aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.
Like, holy shit.
One of the other astronauts on the mission was quoted as saying, "It's like getting to play baseball with Babe Ruth."
On October 29, 1998, John Glenn became the oldest person to enter space, when he blasted off at the age of 77. On his 9-day mission he helped deploy some satellites and other equipment, performed over 80 scientific experiments, orbited at a height more than twice what he achieved in Friendship 7, and orbited earth another 134 times.
The citizens of Perth, Australia left their lights on all night so he could see them, just as they had done for him 36 years earlier while he was in Friendship 7.
