Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962, but he was also known for his brief but profound quote in which he elevated the idea of space travel to a metaphysical level.
“To look at this kind of creation here and not believe in God is impossible to me,” John Herschel Glenn Jr. said after his second and final time in space in 1998.
He said he prayed every day on his spaceflights, an apparent dichotomy where science and the concept of God are seen as opposing ideas.
Glenn didn’t see it that way.
He was a devout Presbyterian.
“John Glenn is always used as a poster child for someone who had a strong faith before he became an astronaut, and for him that was strengthened by his experience in space,” Mark Shellhammer, a professor of medicine who served as chief scientist for human research at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, told The Washington Post in 2016 after Glenn’s death.
In this apparent paradox of being sincere and scientific, Glenn was no stranger in himself.
American astronaut James Irwin, who walked on the moon, devoted his life to religion and founded the missionary organization High Flight. Buzz Aldrin was an elder in his Presbyterian church, and served himself Communion as one of his first acts during the first man’s landing on the moon. “Under one-sixth of the moon’s gravity, the wine slowly wrinkled and rose gracefully up the side of the glass,” he later said of that moment.
“You’ll hear this from astronauts a lot of times — that they felt a kind of human loneliness,” Shellhammer told WaPo.
James Irwin, who was aboard Apollo 15, the fourth human landing on the moon, and was the eighth person to walk on the moon’s surface, said of his experience: “As we moved farther and farther away, (the Earth) got smaller and smaller. Finally it shrank to the size of marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. This beautiful, warm living body seemed so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with your finger it would crumble and crumble. Seeing this must change. Man must make man appreciate God’s creation and love.” God.”
John Glenn was once asked to address this problem head-on. “I don’t see myself as being any less religious by the fact that I can appreciate the fact that science only records that we change with evolution and time, and that’s a fact,” he told the AP. “That doesn’t mean it’s any less wonderful, and it doesn’t mean that there can’t be a power greater than any of us that is lurking behind everything that’s going on.”
Glenn was a US Marine Corps pilot and later a businessman and politician. He was the third American in space and the first to orbit the Earth, orbiting it three times in 1962.
He became a member of the Democratic Party later in life, and was a state senator from 1974 to 1999 from Ohio. He flew into space again at the age of 77 in 1998.
Before joining NASA, Glenn was a fighter pilot, flew missions in World War II, and earned six Distinguished Flying Crosses and eighteen Air Medals in his career.
His extreme experiences, which he said strengthened his faith in God, included one in 1957, when he made the first supersonic transcontinental flight across the United States. He had a camera with him that took the first panoramic photo of the country.
Glenn was one of the “Mercury Seven”, military test pilots selected by NASA in 1959 to be the nation’s first astronauts. On February 20, 1962, Glenn flew on the Friendship 7 mission, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. He was the third American and fifth person in space. He was the last surviving member of Mercury Seven, and died at the age of 95 in 2016.
