John Glenn Orbit Earth in 1962

WILLIAMSPORT SUN-GAZETTE, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1962.

* John Glenn becomes 1st person to cirlce the globe in orbit - original reporting - great, unique gift idea

This 20 page newpaper has a nice two line banner headline on the front page: "Glenn Scores Stunning Triumph for U.S.; Becomes First American to Orbit Earth" with subhead: "Astronaut Circles Globe Three Times" and a nice banner pictorial of the historic feat. Other news of the day throughout. Some stray ink writing on the front page with a few margin tears, otherwise in good condition.

 

Historical Background: In April 1959 Glenn was assigned to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as one of the original group of Mercury astronauts for the Mercury Project. During this time, he remained an officer in the Marine Corps. He piloted the first American manned orbital mission aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962.

After completing three orbits, the "Mercury Atlas 6" mission, lasting 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds, Glenn was celebrated as a national hero, and received a ticker-tape parade reminiscent of Lindbergh. His fame and political gifts were noted by the Kennedys, and he became a personal friend of the Kennedy family; after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy asked Glenn to give the news to the Kennedy children on the day of November 22, 1963.

Glenn resigned from NASA six weeks after the Kennedy assassination to run for office in his home state of Ohio. In 1965 Glenn retired as a Colonel from the USMC and entered the business world as an executive for Royal Crown Cola. He reentered the world of politics later on. Some accounts of Glenn's years at NASA suggest that Glenn was prevented from flying in Gemini or Apollo missions, either by President John F. Kennedy himself or by NASA management, on the grounds that the subsequent loss of a national hero of such stature would seriously harm or even end the manned space program. Yet Glenn resigned from the astronaut corps on January 30, 1964, well before even the first Gemini crew was assigned.

Glenn lifted off for a second space flight on October 29, 1998, on Space ShuttleDiscovery's STS-95 in order to study the effects of space flight on the elderly. At age 77, Glenn became the oldest person ever to go into space. Glenn's participation in the nine-day mission was criticized by some in the space community as a junket for a politician. Others noted that Glenn's flight offered valuable research on weightlessness and other aspects of space flight on the same person at two points in life thirty-five years apart  by far the farthest interval between space flights by the same person. Upon the safe return of the STS-95 crew, Glenn (and his crewmates) received another ticker-tape parade, making him the ninth (and, as of 2006, final) person to have ever received multiple ticker tape parades in his lifetime (as opposed to that of a sports team)^{[citation needed]}.

In an ironic twist, Glenn himself vehemently opposed the sending of Dennis Tito, the world's first space tourist, to the station on the grounds that he served no scientific purpose.[1]

The NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio is named after him. Colonel Glenn Highway, which runs by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University near Dayton, Ohio, is also named after him