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John Glenn (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was a United States Marine Corps aviator , astronaut , and politician. Before joining NASA , Glenn was a distinguished fighter pilot in World War II , the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War . In 1957, he made the first supersonic transcontinental flight across the United States. He was one of the Mercury Seven , military test pilots selected in 1959 by NASA as the nation's first astronauts. On February 20, 1962, Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, and the fifth person and third American in space. After retiring from NASA, he served from 1974 to 1999 as a Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio . In 1998, Glenn flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-95 , making him the oldest person to enter Earth orbit and the only person to fly in both Project Mercury and the Space Shuttle program . He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. (Full article... )
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