On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome and became the first human to enter space and the first to orbit the Earth. This triggered a bitter struggle between the Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union. For months the American people were in depression. Two US manned space launches in May and July 1961 did little to mitigate their misery, because these were 15-minute sub-orbital missions that only flirted with the fringe of space and were clearly inferior to the Soviet feat.

The Soviets repeated their success in August, heightening fears that they were decisively winning the Space Race. It was therefore a long wait till February 20, 1962, when the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) finally launched Friendship 7, showing that it could compete on an equal basis in the space arena. And the astronaut aboard was John Glenn. He became the fifth human in space and the first American to orbit the Earth.

John Herschel Glenn was born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio. He distinguished himself as a fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean conflict, flying about 150 combat missions and shooting down three North Korean MiGs in combat along the Yalu River. He twice returned to base with over 250 bullet holes in his plane. During his military career he was awarded Distinguished Flying Cross six times and 18 clusters on his Air Medal. After the Korean War, Glenn joined the US Naval Test Pilot School in Maryland in January 1954, and graduated in July. One of his main achievements as a test pilot was a long-distance speed record he set on July 16, 1957, when he made the first supersonic transcontinental flight in an F8U Crusader. He covered the 3,935-km distance from Los Alamitos, California, to New York City in three hours and 23 minutes.

The following year, the nascent astronaut corps asked for volunteers and Glenn’s experience and skill as a military test pilot made him a prime candidate. Although he was near the cut-off age of 40, he performed well in a battery of assessments, including physical tests of stamina and psychological tests of maturity, alertness and motivation. So it came about that in 1959, John Glenn was selected as one of NASA’s first batch of astronauts known as the Mercury Seven. But the risks of the space programme were enormous as the Mercury team soon realised. In May 1959, they assembled at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to witness the first test launch of an SM-65D Atlas rocket. It was similar to the one that was planned to take the first American into orbit. A few minutes after lift-off, it exploded. However, the first two US manned sub-orbital launches took place without major incident. Glenn was the backup astronaut for both missions. And next it was his turn.

Glenn’s mission was originally scheduled for December 1961 but postponed several times due to technical problems with the Atlas rocket. Finally, he was flawlessly launched aboard Friendship 7 early morning of February 20, 1962, for a planned seven orbits of the Earth. However, the automatic control system failed at the end of the first orbit and Glenn had to control the craft manually for the rest of the flight. More seriously, during the second of three orbits, an onboard sensor issued a warning that Friendship 7’s heat shield and landing bag were not secure. This was a potentially fatal issue because the spacecraft might burn up on re-entry. So Mission Control decided to abort the flight early.

As Glenn calmly commenced the recovery sequence, he was instructed to delay jettisoning his retrorocket pack so that it might protect the heat shield for some time. He saw big chunks of burning material flying past the spacecraft’s window and feared the worst. But the re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and the subsequent splashdown in the North Atlantic happened as planned. In all, he had orbited the Earth thrice in 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds at a speed of 28,000 km per hour. Later he told a reporter who asked him about the flaming debris, “Fortunately it was the rocket pack or I wouldn’t be answering these questions.”

America gratefully accepted Glenn as a hero, one who had crossed a significant scientific as well as political milestone and instantly restored their pride in the grim and bitter struggle for supremacy against the Soviet Union. However, as a reward, Glenn was grounded! Apparently President Kennedy did not want to risk any harm coming to this national icon during the high-risk early exploration of space.

Next, Glenn tried to enter politics, but success was ten years coming. However, once he was elected senator in 1974, he did such a good job that he remained in office till January 1999. As a US senator, he focused on improving the lot of the ageing population. Amazingly, his second and last spaceflight happened after a gap of 36 years when he was 77. On October 29, 1998, he was launched into space as Payload Specialist on board the shuttle STS-95 Discovery. Thus he became the oldest person ever to fly in space and the only one to fly in both the Mercury and space shuttle programmes. While in orbit for almost nine days, he participated in a series of tests on the ageing process. John Glenn died on December 8, 2016, at the age of 95. Apart from professional records he had set a personal mark — being married to Anna Margaret for 73 years. They first met when he was three and she was four.