He served as a backup pilot for the Mercury-Redstone 3 and Mercury-Redstone 4 suborbital flights, assisting astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom as they boarded the small Mercury spacecraft and conducted final tests.
On February 20, 1962, he took off as a pilot at the top of an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on the Mercury Atlas 6 mission “Friendship 7”. He was the first American to orbit the earth three times. The entire mission lasted four hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds.
After the flight, Glenn was groomed to be an American Idol. President John F. Kennedy maintained a public friendship with him, but secretly ordered that Glenn be banned from further space flights so as not to endanger the idol’s life. In 1964, Glenn left NASA and became CEO of a beverage company.
In the period that followed, he unsuccessfully applied several times for one of the seats in his home state of Ohio in the United States Senate. He finally won the election in 1974 and was re-elected with a large majority in 1980, as well as in 1986 and 1992. Glenn represented Ohio’s interests until 1999. In 1984 he unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
From October 29 to November 7, 1998, Glenn was in space again on the space shuttle Discovery as part of the space shuttle mission STS-95, this time orbiting the Earth 134 times. The aim was to investigate how weightlessness affects old people. At 36 years old, he holds the record for the longest period of time between two space flights. At 77 years old, he was also the oldest astronaut in space at the time. He held this record until July 20, 2021, when 82-year-old Wally Funk completed a ten-minute space flight. Glenn is still the oldest astronaut to enter Earth orbit. After the death of Scott Carpenter, he was the last living Mercury astronaut as of October 11, 2013.
John Glenn married Anna Margaret Castor on April 6, 1943 in New Concord. The two had known each other since childhood. They had two children, a son (* 1945) and a daughter (* 1947).
John Glenn died December 8, 2016 in Columbus, Ohio and was buried with military honors as a member of the United States Marine Corps on April 6, 2017 in the presence of his widow and children at Arlington National Cemetery under the command of CMC Robert B. Neller.
His widow Annie Glenn advocated for people with language difficulties and other disabilities, stuttered herself, improved her speech skills at the age of 53 by attending a course, and died in May 2020 at the age of 100 in a Minnesota nursing home after a COVID-19 infection.