Remembering John Glenn’s Historic Space Flight, 50 Years Ago Today

On this day a half cen­tu­ry ago, Mer­cury Astro­naut John Glenn became the first Amer­i­can to orbit the Earth. On the morn­ing of Feb­ru­ary 20, 1962, an anx­ious nation watched as Glenn climbed into his cramped Friend­ship 7 space cap­sule and was pro­pelled by an Atlas 6 rock­et high above the atmos­phere. He cir­cled the Earth three times before re-enter­ing the atmos­phere and splash­ing down in the Atlantic Ocean. As the vet­er­an space pro­gram reporter John Noble Wil­ford wrote last week in The New York Times, “Per­haps no oth­er spaceflight–all 4 hours, 55 min­utes and 23 sec­onds of it–has been fol­lowed by so many with such par­a­lyz­ing appre­hen­sion.”

You can get a sense of the dra­ma and excite­ment of that day by watch­ing the news­reel above, and by read­ing Wil­ford’s inter­est­ing piece in the Times. Also, NASA has put togeth­er an inter­ac­tive online fea­ture on the mis­sion. At a time when Amer­i­ca’s manned space pro­gram depends on Russ­ian space­craft to car­ry astro­nauts to and from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion, it’s all the more poignant to look back on the day 50 years ago when Glenn became, as writer Tom Wolfe put it, “the last true nation­al hero Amer­i­ca has ever had.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“First Orbit”: Cel­e­brat­ing 50th Anniver­sary of Yuri Gagaran’s Space Flight