Fifty years ago today John Glenn made a successful return to Earth after his Mercury space capsule Friendship 7 completed three orbits of the Earth.
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first man into space on April 12 1961, and Alan Shepard the first American into space three weeks afterwards, but Glenn had made history by becoming the first NASA astronaut to achieve and hold orbit. Three more successful Mercury missions followed before NASA switched their attention to a more ambitious goal – landing a man on the Moon. Successive Gemini and Apollo space programs saw the culmination of this goal with the successful lunar landing of Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.
The Library possesses a large range of material about space flight and the history of astronautics, including access to NASA’s Scientific & Technical Information (STI) web site among our extensive array of Aeronautical databases. But if you’re more into the historical and social side of manned spaceflight rather than the technical stuff, you can find day-to-day press chronicles of every astronautical feat from the 20th century among our newspaper archives such as The Times Digital Archive and The Daily Mirror Archive.
Pictured is the launch of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 capsule on February 20th 1962, from the NASA Collection reproduced under CC License from Flickr.
Speech Bubble, Loughborough University Arts’ spoken word open-mic night, returns this March to the Student Union.
