First American Flight in Orbit Celebrated 50 Years Later

On a day like today 50 years ago, a member of the United States Marine Corps, John Glenn, wearing clothes and a helmet similar to what he wore during his service as a wartime pilot, put himself inside a small capsule and became the first American to orbit the Earth.

The United States commemorates, with a series of acts and tributes, the heroic deed of John Glenn, who is now 90 years of age. There will be a dinner tonight in his honor tonight at in the University of the State of Ohio, and Glenn will participate in a chat with the crew of the International Space Station, according to a NASA report.

“I think the duration that people have been interested in that, the first flights back there, have been somewhat of a surprise,” said Glenn about the heroic deed when the commemorations began last Friday.

“We’re so used to the new and the untried in this country, whether it is the equivalent in automobiles or whatever it is. So it has been a little bit of a surprise that attention has been and keeps coming back to some of those very early flights,” Glenn added.

The reason rests, without a doubt, on the patriotic meaning of his flight. Glenn, a veteran of WWII and the Korean War, had within a few hours restored the pride of the United States, which had been hurt by the fact that the Soviet Union took a lead in the first phase of the space race.

Friendship 7, the capsule weighing 1.225 kilograms the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, departed from Cape Canaveral in Florida, launched by a Mercury-Atlas rocket, and completed three orbits, with an apogee of 265 kilometers in four hours, 55 minutes and 20 seconds.

After getting back into the Earth’s atmosphere, the capsule fell into the Atlantic Ocean and was picked up by the USS Noa.

When the hatch opened, Glenn, with his wide smile and courage, had won one of the most important battles of the Cold War: that of the image.

In 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union were pushing for world domination, and having recently had a confrontation because of the Soviet block in Berlin, they were on their way to another, even more dangerous, confrontation with the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

In the space competition, USSR had made the first jump when on Oct. 4, 1957 a metal artifact weighing 86 kilograms began one of 1,440 orbits. For three months, the machine kept sending its “beep beep” from space, and the Americans felt humiliated.

Soviets and Americans competed in sending capsules to space, in many cases with animals that paid with their lives for human ambition.

Those were followed by real human pioneers beyond the atmosphere: On April 12, 1962 the Soviet war pilot Yuri Gagarin, aboard the Vostok, completed an orbit around Earth.

The United States sped up its space efforts and sent two of its men, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, in missions that didn’t complete an orbit but successfully rose beyond the atmosphere and quickly returned to Earth.

On Aug. 6, the Soviets made another jump ahead: The Air Force official Gherman Titov boarded the Vostok and orbited the Earth 17 times. He was the first human to demonstrate that it was possible to stay in space for more than a day.

Titov, only 26 years old then and still the youngest human to ever go into space, was the first cosmonaut that piloted a spacecraft directly and took the first pictures, manually, from orbit.

In this context, Glenn became, in the words of the novelist Tom Wolfe, in “the last authentic national hero the United States has had.”

The space competition between the USSR and the United Sates continued its schizophrenic course for another three decades. Both countries had spy satellites and plans for installing weaponry. Their capsules and astronauts encountered each other in the sky through cooperation within labs in orbit.

Glenn went on from his military and astronaut careers to become a politician and, for 25 years, was a senator from Ohio in the United States Congress.

In Oct. 1998, Glenn went back to being a pioneer: at 77 years old, he became the oldest human to go to space during a mission on board the space shuttle Discovery, during which he was the subject of studies about the effect that extraterrestrial voyages have on an aged body.