Back at Mercury Control, the flight team, headed by Chris Kraft and Kranz, kept their focus on more practical considerations. After Glenn’s first orbit, Control had received a telemetry signal indicating that his capsule’s heat shield might be loose. If that signal was correct, Glenn and the spacecraft would disintegrate in the three-thousand-degree heat generated by reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. There seemed to be only one solution to this potentially tragic problem. If Glenn refrained from jettisoning the ship’s retro-rocket package, a normal procedure just before reentry, its titanium straps might hold the shield in place. Control advised Glenn of their decision to end his flight and ordered him to plan for reentry after his third orbit.

Unwilling to burden Glenn with concern over the possible heat-shield malfunction, Control offered no explanation for their decision until he was safely home. Glenn was suspicious, but all parts of Friendship 7 seemed to him to be working properly so he concerned himself only with what was within his control. Before long, the capsule splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean.

“When I started back in through the atmosphere, when the straps that held the retropack on burned off, one of them popped up in front of the window,” Glenn remembers. “I thought the retropack or the heat shield was breaking up. It was a real fireball. But the heat shield worked fine.”

Glenn’s flight was a public relations boon for the U.S. space program. He returned to a hero’s welcome and a wildly emotional New York City ticker-tape parade. The United States had made a significant step forward in its competition with the Soviet Union and its quest for the moon. Few people knew, however, that the nation’s most famous pilot would never again fly in space.

As Glenn recalls, “President Kennedy had passed word to NASA, and I didn’t know this for some years, that I was not to be used again on a flight, at least for a while. You can’t believe being the focal point of that kind of attention when we came back. I don’t know if he was concerned about political fallout, or what.” Glenn was disappointed that he never again traveled into space, but declares,”I don’t feel cheated because I had such a tremendous flight.”

Three years after the confetti and streamers had blown away, John Glenn left NASA and, relegating space flight to a vivid memory, moved into another public arena. Politics is a high-profile world in which Glenn’s clean-cut image and amiable personality easily endeared him to his constituents and to the public in general. In 1974, he was elected to the U.S. Senate by his home state of Ohio, an office he has held through three more terms.

Despite the passage of more than a quarter century, Glenn easily recalls the innocent joy he found in those wondrous space sunsets. He has never lost the ability to draw inspiration from his experiences and to channel it into a positive outlook. “I think its an attitude,” he says, of maintaining his inner youth. “I think kids have an expectation of what’s going to happen tomorrow. I think some people are able to maintain that whole thing, this expectation about what they’re looking forward to.”

Not surprisingly, Senator Glenn can easily find his time consumed by the business of Capitol Hill. But when a red-headed, freckle-faced teenager with blue eyes ablaze asks Glenn to describe a launch or splashdown, the senator from Ohio again becomes one of America’s first astronauts, as he relives that historic day in 1962 when time stood still and three space sunsets blazed like campfires of a thousand sparkling colors.

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Bryan Ethier is a freelance writer from Connecticut. After Mercury, his retrospective book on the effect the Mercury Space Program has had on the world, will be published in the spring by McGregor Hill.

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