• Home
• Politicians
• John Glenn

John Glenn Politician

John Herschel Glenn, Jr. (Col, USMC, Ret.; born July 18, 1921) is a former U.S. Marine Corps aviator, engineer, astronaut and United States senator. He is the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven, the original group of military test pilots selected in 1959 by the American space agency NASA to operate its Mercury spacecraft and become America's first astronauts.On February 20, 1962, Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission and became the first American to orbit the Earth and the fifth person in space, after cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov and the sub-orbital missions of fellow Mercury Seven astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. Glenn resigned from NASA on January 16, 1964, and the next day announced plans to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio. But injury from a bathtub concussion caused him to withdraw from the race the following March. He retired from the Marine Corps on January 1, 1965. A member of the Democratic Party, he finally won election to the Senate in 1974 and served through January 3, 1999.Glenn received a Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990. On October 29, 1998, while still a sitting senator, he became the oldest person to fly in space, and the only one to fly in both the Mercury and Space Shuttle programs, when at age 77, he flew as a Payload Specialist on Discovery (STS-95). Glenn is also the earliest-born American to go to orbit, and the second earliest-born man overall after Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy, who was born three months and three days earlier. With the death of Scott Carpenter on October 10, 2013, Glenn became the last surviving member of the Mercury 7. Also, with the death of Edward Brooke on January 3, 2015, Glenn became the oldest living former United States Senator.

Personal facts

Alias (AKA)	Glenn John Herschel Jr. (full name)
Birth date	July 18, 1921
Birth place	Ohio , Cambridge Ohio
Religion	Presbyterianism
Residence	Columbus Ohio
Education	Muskingum University
Spouse	Annie Glenn

• facebook
• tumblr
• linkedin
• twitter
• reddit
• google+