John Glenn – American Hero
John Glenn entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in March 1942 and was graduated from this program and commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1943. After advanced training, Glenn joined Marine Fighter Squadron 155 and spent a year flying F-4U fighters in the Marshall Islands.
During John Glenn’s World War II service, he flew 59 combat missions. After the war, he was a member of Marine Fighter Squadron 218 on the North China patrol and served on Guam. From June 1948 to December 1950 Glenn was an instructor in advanced flight training at Corpus Christi, Texas. He then attended Amphibious Warfare Training at Quantico, Virginia. In Korea Glenn flew 63 missions with Marine Fighter Squadron 311. As an exchange pilot with the Air Force Glenn flew 27 missions in the in F-86 Sabrejet. In the last nine days of fighting in Korea Glenn downed three MIG’s in combat along the Yalu River.
After Korea, John Glenn attended Test Pilot School at the Naval Air Test Center, Patuxent River, Maryland. After graduation, he was project officer on a number of aircraft. Glenn was assigned to the Fighter Design Branch of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics (now Bureau of Naval Weapons) in Washington from November 1956 to April 1959, during which time he also attended the University of Maryland.
In July 1957, while project officer of the F8U Crusader, John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York, spanning the country in 3 hours and 23 minutes. This was the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed. Glenn has nearly 9,000 hours of flying time, with approximately 3,000 hours in jet aircraft.
On February 20, 1962, Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 “Friendship 7” spacecraft on the first manned orbital mission of the United States. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed a successful three-orbit mission around the earth, reaching a maximum altitude (apogee) of approximately 162 statute miles and an orbital velocity of approximately 17,500 miles per hour. Glenn’s “Friendship 7” Mercury spacecraft landed approximately 800 miles southeast of KSC in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island. Mission duration from launch to impact was 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds.
Glenn next blasted off on STS-95 Space Shuttle Discovery (October 29 to November 7, 1998). This was a 9-day mission during which Glenn supported a variety of research payloads including deployment of the Spartan solar-observing spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope Orbital Systems Test Platform, and investigations on space flight and the aging process. The mission was accomplished in 134 Earth orbits, traveling 3.6 million miles in 213 hours and 44 minutes. John Glenn was 77 years old at the time of this Space Flight.
To Learn More about John Glenn and other Space Heroes – watch these great videos from Discovery
Tags: glenn, NASA, Popular Culture, Space Program
We the people, escalieply us in the middle and poverty classes, are loosing our country. It is becoming a corporate run aristocracy. All of us have lost our civil rights with enactment of the Patriot Act. Being bugged without warrant, loss of habeus corpus, illegal wars, indefinite detainment, etc., etc., are things even JFK as president could have seen possible let alone probable. The poor and middle class have lost power of their vote, their very small means to effect change through elections, to the Citizens United decision where the lobbyists and corporations yet again, profit by buying elections and running the country through their elected puppets . Who had the bright idea to allow corporations be counted as humans??? Tax cuts to the middle class are appropriate in tough times but to continue those cuts for people and corporations clearing over $200,000. or even 500,000 as suggested as an alternative is insane. We have to borrow money to support those cuts. Making only $10,000/yr. (a disabled senior) it would take me 20 years to go through 200,000. And then there are the subsidies paid to oil companies, banks, corporate owned farms, etc. even after their showing off the chart profits they continue to collect from the pockets of tax payers. People in the U.S. have yet to wake up and face the failure of trickle down economics where the rich get richer off the back of the poor who continue to work hard and put up with minimum wages, no cost of living increase in sight. Then there are the lies about Social Security; We pay for it, it is OURS, We the people not to be gambled with in the stock market as the Republicans would love to do (i.e. give it to Wall Street to play with) or to be borrowed against or from or lied about in the attempt to instill fear. We have people going to bed hungry every night; we have more and more people homeless thanks to Wall Street; the quality and availability of education diminishing- this happening in the U.S. Of A. This is just wrong. Yes, we have global responsibilities as well such global warming, wars etc. We need to look in our own back yard first; we need to clean up our act on all levels, environmentally, socially, etc. We as individuals need to look at what greed and the thirst for power has done to our country. We have lost sight of our responsibility to community; me and mine doesn’t cut it. What’s wrong with spreading the wealth escalieply since the wealth was accumulated off the back of the little guy breaking his back for the CEO of his company who doesn’t even have a clue. Check out the televisions phenomena Undercover Boss a CBS production. Out there wars are killing us physically and economically generating more and more hatred toward Americans as undeclared wars against Al-queda continue to pop-up all over the mid-east. Once again, big money for corporations through all kinds of government contracts for everything from guns to mercenaries with the rich get even richer Halliburton, Blackwater, Boeing, and the list goes on and on. But it is We, in our own backyards, who are responsible if we don’t stand up and do the only thing left to us since elections have been stolen by the rich, backed (and paid for) by corporations. We need to follow the example of the Egyptians who after 30 years of enduring loss of their liberties, finally realized no one was paying attention to the little guy, their elections a farce. We’ve Americans have lost our say through elections so must resort to what will finally be heard: non-violent civil disobedience. When I was growing up I heard I could be whatever I wanted, even president of the United States, as long as I worked for it. That may have been true then but now it is only the wealthy and well connected who can buy whatever they want including any elected position in government.