John Glenn, astronaut and senator, and the Ohio institutions that carry his name
The first American to orbit Earth served 24 years in the Senate. His name is on an Ohio State school, a NASA center near Cleveland and Columbus's airport.
John Glenn was the kind of figure Ohio produces only a few times a century: a combat pilot, the first American to orbit the Earth, a four-term U.S. senator and, at 77, the oldest person to fly in space at the time.
New Concord to orbit
Glenn was born in Cambridge, Ohio, in 1921 and grew up in New Concord, where he met his wife, Annie. He flew combat missions as a Marine pilot in World War II and Korea, then became a test pilot and set a transcontinental speed record in 1957.
NASA selected him as one of the Mercury Seven astronauts. On Feb. 20, 1962, he orbited the Earth three times aboard Friendship 7, a flight that made him a national hero.
Twenty-four years in the Senate
Glenn, a Democrat, won a Senate seat from Ohio in 1974 and served until 1999. He worked on nuclear nonproliferation and government oversight and ran briefly for president in 1984. In 1998, while still a senator, he flew on the space shuttle Discovery, partly to help study aging.
His name in Ohio
Several Ohio institutions carry his name. The John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State trains public servants, and his papers are kept there. NASA’s research center in Cleveland was renamed the John H. Glenn Research Center in 1999, and it operates a test site, now called Armstrong Test Facility, near Sandusky in Erie County, just north of Bellevue. Columbus’s airport became John Glenn Columbus International in 2016.
The NASA site near Sandusky, long known as Plum Brook Station, employs engineers and technicians from across the area and runs some of the world’s largest space environment test chambers. We covered that link in our profile of Neil Armstrong, the other Ohio astronaut whose name is on the facility.
Glenn died in Columbus in December 2016 at 95. More profiles of Ohioans are in People & Profiles.