John Herschel Glenn, Jr. (born July 18, 1921), (
Col,
USMC, Ret.), is a former
Marine Corps aviator,
engineer,
astronaut, and
United States senator. He was selected as one of the "
Mercury Seven" group of military
test pilots selected in 1959 by
NASA to become America's first astronauts and fly the
Project Mercury spacecraft. 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
sub-orbital flights of Mercury astronauts
Alan Shepard and
Gus Grissom. Glenn is the earliest-born American to go to orbit, and the second earliest-born man overall after Soviet cosmonaut
Georgy Beregovoy. Glenn received the
Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and was inducted into the
U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990. With the death of
Scott Carpenter on October 10, 2013, Glenn became the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven. Glenn resigned from NASA on January 16, 1964, and the next day announced plans to run for a U.S. Senate seat from
Ohio. But injury from a bathtub concussion caused him to withdraw from the race in March. He retired from the Marine Corps on January 1, 1965. A member of the
Democratic Party, he finally won election to the Senate in 1974 and served through January 3, 1999. With the death of
Edward Brooke on January 3, 2015, Glenn became the oldest living former United States Senator.