John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18, 1921, and died on December 8, 2016.
He was an American aviator, engineer, astronaut, and United States Senator from Ohio.
Glenn was 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, he flew the Friendship seven 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.
He was the earliest-born American to go to orbit, and the second earliest-born man overall after Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy.
He received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990.
He was the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven after the death of Scott Carpenter in 2013.
John Glenn passed away at 95 years old.