Did a more heroic a figure than John Glenn ever don a spacesuit or climb into a capsule? Perhaps not; his imprint has shaped the course of space exploration since the earliest days to the present. Fifty years ago — on Feb. 20, 1962 — he led the United States into Earth orbit with a daring flight aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft that might have been modest in actual accomplishment but was gigantic in meaning. With the nation locked in a Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, success in space served as a surrogate for a grand rivalry in which everyone believed only one way of life — democratic and capitalistic or communist and totalitarian — would survive.
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