When he was 77 and completing his fourth Senate term in 1998, he had one final flight of glory, returning to space as a crew member aboard the space shuttle Discovery.Īs heroes go, the freckle-faced Mr. Glenn served on Capitol Hill for 24 years and made a halfhearted run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. “John Glenn, in 1962, was the last true national hero America has ever had.”Īfter he was elected to the U.S. Glenn and the other Mercury astronauts, wrote in a 2009 essay. “You had to have been alive at that time to comprehend the reaction of the nation, practically all of it,” author Tom Wolfe, who coined the phrase “the right stuff” to describe Mr. When he emerged smiling from his Friendship 7 capsule after returning from space, cheers echoed throughout the land. Glenn, in his silver astronaut suit, lifted the hopes of a nation on his shining shoulders. In an era when fear of encroaching Soviet influence reached from the White House to kindergarten classrooms, Mr. Glenn was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven. He was not the first American in space - two of his fellow astronauts preceded him - but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the globe captured the imagination of his countrymen like few events before or since. Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA’s Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country’s military and technological might at the height of the Cold War. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced. The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. John Glenn, who captured the nation’s attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec.

First man to orbit the earth