Chapter Three
Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

The next few years were busy ones for John and Annie Glenn. Now they had what they’d always wanted—two children of their own. John David (Dave) was born December 13, 1945, and Carolyn (Lyn) on March 15, 1947. Glenn wasn’t able to spend as much time with his children as he would have liked, though. As a Marine captain, Glenn was often sent to the other side of the globe—to places like China, Okinawa, and Guam. Sometimes his growing family was able to accompany him—and sometimes they were not.

After the Korean War broke out, Glenn was assigned to combat duty again. In the frigid winter of 1953, he found himself in Korea piloting fighter-bombers, just as he had in World War II. His mission targets were railroads, bridges, supply depots, enemy troops—whatever command ordered.

That summer Glenn had a special goal—to become a fighter ace. Everybody knew that only the most daring pilots could engage the enemy in air-to-air combat. Glenn longed to prove he was one of them.

Soon enough, he made the grade. Flying the fastest plane of the war, the F86 Sabre, Glenn shot down three enemy MiGs in just nine days. “Today, finally got a MiG as cold as can be,” he wrote home to his family after his first hit. “Of course, I’m not excited at this point. Not much!”

His dogfighting days did not last long, however. On July 27, 1953, a truce was declared. Glenn headed back to the States, and again he had to decide what to do. For an ambitious Marine pilot on his way up the military ladder, the most exciting choice was to become a test pilot.

Test pilots had the most dangerous aviation job of all. They had to try out new aircraft to make sure they were combat ready. Methodically, pilots would test each part of the plane: its electronics, its instruments, its weapons. Every day, they risked their lives. If a system did not work—well, it was a long way to the ground!

Glenn didn’t know whether he would even qualify. After all, he had never even finished college, and most of the other test pilots were graduates of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Glenn realized he would have to work hard to make up for his lack of formal education. Night after night, he stayed up until the early morning hours studying algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. By sheer willpower, he passed the qualifying examinations.

It was not long before Glenn discovered how dangerous the job could be. One day he was flying out over the Atlantic Ocean, testing the firing capabilities of the FJ-3, the “Fury,” when he heard a loud explosion.

The seal of the canopy had blown open! Whoosh! The air streamed out in a rush. Now Glenn was in a depressurized cabin eight miles above the ground.

Not only that, but he had no oxygen. He started gasping for breath.

Immediately he switched to his emergency oxygen backup. But then he found that the unthinkable had happened—the emergency system was broken, too!

Black patches began to float before Glenn’s eyes. He knew he was about to lose consciousness.

Don’t panic, he told himself. This was exactly the sort of desperate situation for which he’d been preparing ever since he had learned to fly.

He still had one hope left. All pilots kept a small extra bottle of oxygen in their parachute pack. Glenn put the plane into a steep dive and with one hand felt for the “little green apple”—a wooden ball connected by wire to the oxygen bottle—sticking out of the pack.

He had only seconds of consciousness left when his hand found the apple and pulled. Oxygen flooded into the hose leading to his helmet. He could breathe again!

Whew! It was a very close call.

One of the planes Glenn flew in those years was the F8U Crusader. The swiftest of the Navy fighter jets, it was able to reach supersonic speeds—faster than the speed of sound.

Glenn had a great idea. Ever competitive, he was always looking for a way to distinguish himself from other test pilots. He realized that the Crusader was the perfect plane to break the existing cross-country record of 3 hours and 45 minutes. The plane could actually go faster than a speeding .45 bullet, which shot out of a gun at “only” 586 mph. The Crusader, by contrast, had already set a speed record of 1,015 mph!

Project Bullet would be the perfect name for his cross-country race, Glenn decided.

Now all he had to do was convince the Navy brass that he was the man to break the record. It took a lot of persuading, but finally his permission came through. The plan was to fly from the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in California to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn—2,445 miles across the continent. On July 16, 1957, Glenn strapped himself into the cockpit of the Crusader and set off.

Climbing swiftly up to 30,000—then 50,000—feet, Glenn reached a top speed of more than 1,000 mph. He could not maintain that astonishing pace, though, because the plane needed three refuelings along the way. At each pit stop, he had to reduce speed to 205 knots and drop down to 25,000 feet. The refueling was carried out in midair, with the Crusader hooked up to a large cargo plane.

As Glenn’s supersonic plane streaked across the continent, a series of sonic booms exploded through the air. Sonic booms occur when an object exceeds the speed of sound. With each huge boom! windows far below shattered from the shock.

His flight path took him right above his hometown of New Concord. There the boom-de-boom boom! was so loud that one of Mrs. Glenn’s neighbors called his mother. “Oh, Mrs. Glenn,” the woman cried. “Johnny dropped a bomb! Johnny dropped a bomb!”

Glenn zoomed into Floyd Bennett Field with no fuel to spare. He had indeed set a cross-country record of 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8.4 seconds, at an average speed of 723 mph. Airplanes had certainly improved from the days when Glenn had chugged along in the old Taylorcraft—at 90 mph!

Annie, the Glenn children, and a crowd of reporters were waiting for him at the airport. The military sent him off on a publicity tour, which John thoroughly enjoyed. Besides appearing on TV and radio shows, he was a contestant on the game show Name That Tune. His partner was a ten-year-old boy named Eddie Hodges, who later starred in the musical The Music Man on Broadway. They made it through three rounds of the show—and won the prize!

Glenn did not expect to be in the public eye for long. A New York Times article made it clear that “At 36, Major Glenn is reaching the practical age limit for piloting complicated pieces of machinery through the air.” Still, the celebrity was nice while it lasted.

Soon the nation’s attention turned to more urgent matters. Just a few months after Glenn’s flight, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first Earth satellite, a little steel spider named Sputnik 1. The American public was shocked—and a bit scared, too. The Russians had proved that their technology was superior. From space, Americans feared, the Communists could launch missiles at the United States. America had to catch up—and fast. Already, John Glenn’s supersonic speed record seemed old-fashioned and unimportant. The new frontier would be not in the Earth’s atmosphere, but in space. The space race was on!

The first American satellite, Explorer 1, was quickly sent into orbit on January 31, 1958. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower knew that satellites would not be enough. What America demanded was a man in space. That July, he formed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. On December 17, 1958, the anniversary of the first Wright Brothers flight, NASA announced its first manned space project: Project Mercury, named after the winged messenger of the Roman gods. They were looking for a few good men to send into space: astronauts, sailors to the stars.

John Glenn was first in line.