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John Glenn USMC Memorial video - December 2016

593 views · Published 23 December 2016 · 1:36 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: airailimages · 2016 · Autos & Vehicles

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The United States Marine Corps honored one of their own, John Glenn, with a brief video. Details of Glenn's life, provided by NASA, include:  "Former astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn died Thursday, 8 December 2016, in Columbus, Ohio. 
Glenn, who served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was one of NASA's original seven Mercury astronauts. His flight on Friendship 7 on 20 February 1962 showed the world that America was a serious contender in the space race with the Soviet Union. It also made Glenn an instant hero.

His mission of almost nine days on the space shuttle orbiter Discovery, launched 29 October 1998, when he was 77, made him the oldest human to venture into space. On Discovery he participated in a series of tests on the aging process. The aging population was one focus of his work as a U.S. senator.
Glenn will always be remembered as the first American to orbit the Earth during those tentative, challenging, daring days when humans were just beginning to venture beyond the atmosphere.

While Glenn's flight on Friendship 7 was a national triumph, problems arose that could have spelled disaster. The first was a failure of the automatic control system. A scheduled 30-minute test to determine whether Glenn could fly the capsule manually became a matter of life and death when the automatic system went out at the end of the first orbit.

"I went to manual control and continued in that mode during the second and third orbits, and during re-entry," Glenn recalled later. He had been confident he could do it. "The malfunction just forced me to prove very rapidly what had been planned over a longer period of time."

Another problem seemed even more serious -- telemetry indicated the spacecraft's heat shield was loose. It seemed possible that Glenn and the spacecraft could be incinerated on re-entry. Glenn left the retrorocket pack in place to steady the heat shield during re-entry. "It made for a very spectacular re-entry from where I was sitting," he said. Big chunks of the burning material came flying by the window.

He wasn't sure whether the flaming debris was the rocket pack or the heat shield breaking up. "Fortunately," he told an interviewer," it was the rocket pack -- or I wouldn't be answering these questions."

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born 18 July 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio. He received a bachelor of science degree in engineering from Muskingum College in New Concord. 

Glenn entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in March 1942. He graduated and was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1943. He joined Marine Fighter Squadron 155 and spent a year flying F4U fighters in the Marshall Islands. He flew 59 combat missions during World War II.

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 he served as an instructor in advanced flight training at Corpus Christi, Texas. He then attended Amphibious Warfare Training at Quantico, Va.

In Korea he flew 63 missions with Marine Fighter Squadron 311. As an exchange pilot with the Air Force Glenn flew 27 missions in the F-86 Sabre. In the last nine days of fighting in Korea, Glenn shot down three MiGs in combat along the Yalu River.

Glenn attended Test Pilot School at the Naval Air Test Center, Patuxent River, Md. After graduation, he was project officer on a number of aircraft. He was assigned to the Fighter Design Branch of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington from November 1956 to April 1959. During that time he also attended the University of Maryland.

In July 1957, while he was project officer of the F8U Crusader, he set a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York -- 3 hours and 23 minutes. It was the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed.

Glenn accumulated nearly 9,000 hours of flying time, about 3,000 of it in jets.

Glenn was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on six occasions, and holds the Air Medal with 18 Clusters for his service during World War II and Korea. Glenn also received the Navy's astronaut Wings, the Marine Corps' Astronaut Medal, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, and the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Glenn resigned as an astronaut in January 1964. He was promoted to colonel in October 1964 and retired from the Marine Corps on 1 January 1965.

In 1998, Glenn flew on the STS-95 Discovery shuttle flight, a 9-day mission during which the crew supported a variety of research payloads Glenn's investigations on space flight and the aging process."

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(Original video content from the USMC; royalty free music added from the YouTube Audio Library by Airailimages.)

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