John Herschel Glenn, Jr., is a former American pilot, engineer, astronaut and United States senator. He was a combat aviator in the U.S. Marine Corps, and is now the only surviving member of the Mercury Seven: the elite U.S. military test pilots selected by NASA to operate the experimental Mercury spacecraft and who became the first American astronauts. 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 suborbital missions of fellow Mercury Seven astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. In 1965, Glenn retired from the military and resigned from NASA so he could be eligible to stand for election to public office. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 1974 to 1999. Glenn received a Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990. 

July 18th, 1921 in Cambridge  /  Died:   Dec 8th, 2016 - aged 95