John Glenn Orbits the Earth: February 20, 1962

The Space Race · February 20, 1962

John Glenn beside the Friendship 7 capsule at Cape Canaveral before his orbital flight

John Glenn beside the Friendship 7 capsule at Cape Canaveral before his orbital flight · NASA photograph, public domain (PD-USGov-NASA), via Wikimedia Commons

The flight had been scrubbed ten times. When Friendship 7 finally left Cape Canaveral on the morning of February 20, 1962, schools stopped, department stores turned televisions toward the sidewalk, and a country that had been losing the space race in public watched an Atlas rocket carry one man into three orbits.

Halfway through, a sensor told mission control that the heat shield might be loose. The decision was to leave the spent retrorocket package strapped over it, which meant Glenn came down with burning straps flying past his window and no certainty about what was underneath. He landed safely, forty miles from the recovery ship, after four hours and fifty-five minutes.

The sensor turned out to be faulty. What everybody remembers instead is the ticker tape, the address to Congress, and the fact that Americans had finally done the thing the Soviets did first — and that a man had come back to say what it was like.

On the record

  • Launched February 20, 1962 aboard Mercury-Atlas 6; three orbits in 4 hours 55 minutes.
  • A heat-shield warning during the flight was later traced to a faulty sensor.
  • Glenn was the third American in space but the first to orbit the Earth.
  • He returned to orbit in 1998 aboard the shuttle Discovery at age 77.

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Sources: NASA — Mercury-Atlas 6 mission summary · Image file at Wikimedia Commons.

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