Astronaut and politician

born July 18 1921

died December 8 2016

JOHN Glenn, who has died aged 95, became the first American to orbit the Earth and the fifth person in space, on the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission in 1962; 36 years later, while a United States senator, he became the oldest person in space when he flew as a crew member of the Discovery Space Shuttle.

Glenn was the third American in space, but the first to orbit the Earth, passing around it three times during a five-hour flight aboard Friendship 7. His achievement, at the height of the Cold War and the competitive “Space Race” between the USA and the Soviet Union, made him a national hero. He was greeted on his return with a ticker-tape parade through New York City and a ceremony at Cape Canaveral attended by President Kennedy.

But there had been serious worries about whether Glenn would return safely at all. The lift-off of the rocket was delayed for almost four hours after Glenn entered the capsule, which he had helped to design, when three separate faults were detected. Then, while he was in orbit, Nasa ground control believed that the heat shield on his craft had come loose, which would have caused the capsule to burn up on re-entry. Glenn was obliged to keep the retrorockets over segment 51 of his heat shield during his splashdown, which in the event passed off safely. It was later discovered that the indicator, rather than shield itself, had been faulty. He later claimed that the thought at the forefront of his mind had been the fact that every component on the rocket had been chosen by competitive tender.

John Herschel Glenn, junior, was born on July 18 1921 at Cambridge, Ohio and grew up in New Concord. In 1939, he went on from its high school to Muskingham College, where he studied Engineering and Physics. As part of a credit for one course, he also obtained a pilot’s licence. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Glenn quite his degree course to enrol in the US Army Air Corps and, after his training, transferred to the US Marine Corps. He flew transport planes before becoming a fighter pilot, flying 59 combat missions in the South Pacific and later in China, mainly in Corsairs.

After the war, Glenn became a fight instructor at the training school in Corpus Christi, Texas. He then served in the Korean War, flying Panthers and Sabres, shooting down three MiGs, but frequently attracting fire himself. One one mission he returned to base with 250 holes in his plane’s fuselage. Glenn’s distinguished record in both wars led to an impressive tally of awards; he had six (American) DFCs and his Air Medal had no fewer than 18 award stars.

Glenn then went to the US Naval Test Pilot School; in all he clocked up 9,000 flying hours, 3,000 of them in jets. This traditional training ground, immortalised in the book and film The Right Stuff, supplied all of Nasa’s astronauts until the third intake in the late 1960s, when they finally deigned to accept pilots who had not flown test aircraft. Glenn’s most distinguished moment there was completing the first transcontinental supersonic flight (from California to New York, in 3 hours and 23 minutes); the mission went by the name of “Project Bullet”.

Even so, Glenn was fortunate to be selected for the Mercury programme in 1959; he was only just under the upper age limit of 40 and had never completed his science degree, which was technically a requirement. But Nasa were confident enough in his engineering skills to entrust him with a hand in the design of the capsule in which he was eventually to orbit the Earth. He also worked on the design for some of the Apollo programme’s equipment.

After his return to Earth as a celebrity, Glenn became friendly with President Kennedy and confided his political ambitions to him. After resigning from Nasa in 1964, he announced his intention to seek the Democratic party nomination for the Senate for his home state. But after a slip in the bathtub, during which he knocked his head, Glenn withdrew from the race, going instead to work for a cola company (he had retired from the Marine Corps in the rank of Colonel in 1965).

Though his political ambition briefly stalled, Glenn remained close to the Kennedys, particularly Robert, at whose funeral he was a pallbearer. In 1970, he narrowly lost the Democratic primary, but he finally entered the Senate on Christmas Eve 1974, and held on to his seat until 1999.

The highlights of Glenn’s political career were his steering of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act through Congress in 1978, and his long tenure of the chairmanship of the committee for Government Affairs. He also served on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees.

One of Glenn’s other Senate commitments, on a special committee on ageing, gave him the excuse he needed to wangle his way back on board a spacecraft. He managed to convince Nasa that experiments on him, at the age of 77, could be usefully compared with the measurements of his health taken during his first test flight. Some thought this was a pretty thin excuse, but Glenn was taken on the space shuttle Discovery as a payload specialist in October 1989, becoming the oldest person in space.

John Glenn retired from the Senate in 1999. He set up a policy institute at the University of Ohio, and made numerous public appearances (including a cameo in the sitcom Frasier).

He married, in 1943, Anna Castor; they had a son and a daughter.

Andrew McKie