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John Herschel Glenn, Jr. is a retired United States Marine Corps pilot, astronaut, and United States senator. He was a combat aviator in the Marine Corps, and now the only surviving member of the Mercury Seven; the elite U.S. military test pilots selected by NASA to operate the experimental Mercury spacecraft and become the first American 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 suborbital missions of fellow Mercury Seven astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. In 1965, Glenn retired from the military and resigned from NASA so he could be eligible to stand for election to public office. As a member of the Democratic Party he was elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 1974 to 1999.
Glenn received a Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. He was inducted into the 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 on Discovery. With the death of Scott Carpenter in October 2013, Glenn is the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven.
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