John Glenn, in full John Herschel Glenn, Jr., also called John H. Glenn, Jr., (born July 18, 1921, Cambridge, Ohio, U.S.—died December 8, 2016, Columbus, Ohio), the first U.S. Astronaut to orbit Earth, completing three orbits in 1962. (Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, had made a single orbit of Earth in 1961.). On This Day: Friendship 7: John Glenn Orbits the Earth. On this day, John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. In a flight lasting just under five hours, he orbited the.
John Glenn (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962. He entered the United States Marine Corps in 1942 and participated in the Second World War as a fighter pilot. At the end of the conflict, he pursued a career as a military pilot and participated in the Korean War. Becoming a test pilot, he joined in 1959 the first group of astronauts selected by the US space agency, NASA. On February 20, 1962, he was the first American to conduct an orbital flight around the Earth as part of Mercury’s Friendship 7 mission, nearly ten months after the inaugural flight of the Soviet Yuri Gagarin. In 1998, at the age of seventy-seven, he flew one last space flight aboard the Space Shuttle as part of mission STS-95.
John Glenn
In the late 1950s, John Glenn began to take an interest in the space field that was developing at that time. He got to participate in work done by NASA, the newly created US space agency, on the development of a simulator requiring the expertise of a pilot. Subsequently, he participated in the design of the Mercury ship as an expert. When NASA decided to select its first astronauts from military pilots in 1959, he was one of one hundred volunteer pilots.
Project Mercury
The Mercury program is the first US space program to have sent an American into outer space. It was initiated in 1958, a few days after the creation of the NASA space agency, and was completed in 1963. On November 5, 1958, the Space Task Group (STG) was established at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, with Robert Gilruth as its director. On November 26, NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan and his deputy, Hugh Dryden, adopted a suggestion by Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Development at STG, that the manned spaceflight project be called Project Mercury. The name was publicly announced by Glennan on December 17, 1958, the 55th anniversary Wright brothers’ first flight. The program’s objectives were to place a man in orbit around the Earth, to study the effects of the weightlessness on the human body and to develop a reliable recovery system of the spacecraft and its crew. Six manned outer space flights (and nineteen outer space flights without astronauts) took place between 1959 and 1963: two suborbital flights launched by a Mercury-Redstone rocket and four orbital flights launched by an Atlas rocket. The Mercury 3 mission (May 5, 1961) with Alan Shepard on board, was the first manned US outer space flight. The program, which took its name from Roman mythology, will not fail, despite sometimes serious failures of the Mercury capsule.
The Mercury space capsule was produced by McDonnell Aircraft, and carried supplies of water, food and oxygen for about one day in a pressurized cabin. Mercury flights were launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, on launch vehicles modified from the Redstone and Atlas D missiles. The capsule was fitted with a launch escape rocket to carry it safely away from the launch vehicle in case of a failure. The flight was designed to be controlled from the ground via the Manned Space Flight Network, a system of tracking and communications stations; back-up controls were outfitted on board. The Mercury capsule was a one and a half ton, cone-shaped, minimalist spacecraft designed to accommodate a single astronaut and equipped with slewing engines for limited manoeuvring when placed in orbit, as well as retrorockets for re-entry into the atmosphere. At the base of the cone was placed a heat shield made of an ablative material that allowed the vessel to withstand the temperature generated by its atmospheric re-entry at very high speed in the dense layers of the atmosphere. The recovery of the ship was done in open sea.
The Mercury project gained popularity, and its missions were followed by millions on radio and TV around the world. Its success laid the groundwork for Project Gemini, which carried two astronauts in each capsule and perfected space docking manoeuvres essential for manned lunar landings in the subsequent Apollo program announced a few weeks after the first manned Mercury flight.
The Mercury Seven
The Mercury Seven were the group of seven Project Mercury astronauts announced by NASA on April 9, 1959. They are also referred to as the Original Seven or Astronaut Group 1. They piloted the manned spaceflights of the Mercury program from May 1961 to May 1963. These seven original American astronauts were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. Members of the group flew on all of the NASA crewed orbital programs of the 20th century – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle (the last survivor of Mercury Seven, John Glenn, passed away on December 8, 2016, at the age of ninety-five).
Although NASA planned a competition for its first astronauts, President Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted that all candidates be test pilots, which excluded women. Because of the small space inside the Mercury spacecraft, the candidates had to measure less than one meter and eighty centimetres and weigh less than eighty-two kilograms. They also had to be under forty, hold a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, have one thousand and five hundred flying hours and be qualified to fly jet aircraft. After taking several series of physical and psychological tests, John Glenn was selected to be part of the first group of seven astronauts.
What Day Did John Glenn Orbit The Earth
He received a diversified training including both theoretical courses in the field of space and training sessions in simulators. At the same time, like his colleagues, he was assigned to a working group dedicated to the design of the cockpit and, as such, took part in the design of the Apollo program. For the first two missions of the Mercury program, which were simple suborbital flights, he was a substitute for astronauts Shepard and Grissom.
John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth
Glenn was assigned to the third mission of the Mercury program which is to be the first manned orbital flight in the United States of America. The US military was considering, as part of a larger project known as Operation Northwoods (a project of clandestine false-flag military operations designed to manipulate public opinion; it was to hurt or kill US citizens and then accuse Cubans and invade their country), that in case the flight went wrong and Glenn was killed, to attribute the accident to an action by Fidel Castro’s government and justify to the public the invasion of Cuba.
After a launch postponed several times as a result of equipment malfunction or weather problems, John Glenn took off on February 20, 1962 from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida aboard the Mercury-Atlas 6 capsule (the flight was scheduled for December 1961, and had already been delayed twenty times) as part of the Friendship 7 mission (carried to orbit by an Atlas LV-3B launch vehicle lifting off from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida).
The Atlas LV-3B, Atlas D Mercury Launch Vehicle or Mercury-Atlas Launch Vehicle, was a man-rated expendable launch system used as part of the United States Project Mercury to send astronauts into low Earth orbit (LEO). Manufactured by American aircraft manufacturing company Convair, it was derived from the SM-65D Atlas missile, and was a member of the Atlas family of rockets. The Atlas D missile was the natural choice for Project Mercury since it was the only launch vehicle in the US arsenal that could put the spacecraft into orbit and also had a large number of flights from which to gather data. But its reliability was far from perfect and Atlas launches ending in explosions were an all-too common sight at Cape Canaveral. The Atlas had been originally designed as a weapon system.
After three orbits, the ship decelerated and began the very violent phase that characterizes the re-entry into the atmosphere. Glenn saw pieces of the retrorocket pass through the portholes. The speed had dropped enough at this point so that the heat shield could stay in place. Glenn splashed down safely after four hours, fifty-five minutes and twenty-three seconds of flight. He carried a note on the flight which read “I am a stranger. I come in peace. Take me to your leader and there will be a massive reward for you in eternity” in several languages, in case he landed near southern Pacific Ocean islands.
First American To Orbit Earth
As the first American in orbit, Glenn became a national hero, met President John F. Kennedy, and received a ticker-tape parade in New York reminiscent of those honouring Charles Lindbergh and other heroes. He became “so valuable to the nation as an iconic figure”, according to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, that Kennedy would not “risk putting him back in space again”. Glenn’s fame and political potential were noted by the Kennedys, and he became a friend of the Kennedy family. On February 23, 1962, President Kennedy gave him the NASA Distinguished Service Medal for his Friendship 7 flight.
John Glenn Orbits The Earth 1962
In 1995, Glenn was reading Space Physiology and Medicine, a book written by NASA doctors. He realized that many changes that occur to physical attributes during space flight, such as loss of bone and muscle mass and blood plasma, are the same as changes that occur due to aging. Glenn thought NASA should send an older person on a shuttle mission, and thought that it should be him. Starting in 1995, he began lobbying NASA director Dan Goldin for the mission. Goldin said he would consider it if there was a scientific reason, and if Glenn could pass the same physical examination the younger astronauts took. Glenn performed research on the subject, and passed the physical examination. On January 16, 1998, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin announced that Glenn would be part of the STS-95 crew; this made him, at age seventy-seven, the oldest person to fly in space. He became the oldest astronaut in History.